Bridge Up set out to strengthen the capacity of Startup Support Organizations (SSOs) across Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, ensuring they could serve startups in a more sustainable way rather than relying solely on direct donor support.
Innovety conducted comprehensive capacity assessments, facilitated focus groups and partner surveys, and co-designed tailored development roadmaps for each SSO, applying a regional Organizational Assessment Framework inspired by our innovation consulting services.
The result was a set of actionable strategies enabling SSOs to professionalize operations, improve service delivery, and build stronger ecosystems—laying the foundation for long-term sustainability and regional collaboration.
Across the MENA region, Startup Support Organizations (SSOs) play a critical role in nurturing young entrepreneurs. Yet, many SSOs in Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine faced fragile operations, donor dependency, and fragmented approaches that limited their long-term impact.
Rather than strengthening the ecosystem, this left startups vulnerable to inconsistent services and unsustainable growth pathways. The Dot, Tunisia’s leading hub for innovation, together with SPARK and the EU, sought to address this challenge through the Bridge Up initiative.
Key pain points:
Innovety conducted in-depth diagnostics of four SSOs—one in each of Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine—using a structured Organizational Assessment Framework. Through field visits, interviews, and document reviews, the team mapped each SSO’s market positioning, business model, offerings, resources, and delivery channels.
We facilitated focus group discussions with SSO staff to identify service gaps, validate findings, and measure performance against an Evaluation Matrix covering relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, and innovation.
To ensure objectivity, Innovety surveyed institutional partners of each SSO—funders, universities, and ecosystem actors—capturing external feedback on SSO impact and areas for improvement.
Finally, Innovety co-designed four development roadmaps, setting short-, medium-, and long-term actions for each SSO. These roadmaps included governance reforms, service redesign, financial sustainability strategies, and partnership models, enabling SSOs to shift from donor-dependency to sustainable ecosystem leadership.
