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Countries as Companies: Morocco’s use of technology for development | Daily Maverick
Morocco’s “hi-tech story”–creating jobs and new platforms for growth and innovation:
‘Think of your country as a company,” says Larbi Belarbi, a man who helped to bring Renault to Morocco. “As such you need to think of your advantages in the selection of what you do: The location of your market and ease of trading with it, the critical mass of skills and productivity and low costs of your workforce, and the efficiency of your infrastructure. And you need to adapt government to suit, improving each of these areas in making the business case to invest.”
Ten kilometres outside Rabat, on the Tangier-Casablanca highway, is Technopolis, an incubator campus for start-up companies. Inside the glass and concrete buildings just alongside the International University of Rabat, congregate 50 fledgling industries, attracted by low rents, good connectivity, the availability of finance to scale up their activities, and mentoring. Another 260 IT start-ups cluster 90kms way at the Casablanca Technopark, opened in 2001. A third similar park, in Tangier, opened in 2015…[FULL STORY]