Innovation Web Portal Development - Lebanon Innovate Innovation Resource Portal

Berytech is a leading organization in the Innovation Eco-system in Lebanon, that aims to provide a conducive environment for Innovation Ecosystem players in Lebanon through the Lebanon Innovate Program, a 42-month program funded by the European Union to revitalize the Lebanese entrepreneurial ecosystem and the productive sectors. The program, based on an innovation roadmap, fosters innovation through supporting Intellectual Property (IP) and knowledge transfer allowing the country to become a knowledge-driven digital nation at the front end of innovation.

Background

The Lebanese innovation ecosystem is characterized by fragmentation and scattered resources, which have hindered it from achieving its potential. Despite a strong entrepreneurial spirit and a well-educated workforce, the ecosystem faces significant challenges. One major issue is the lack of coordination and collaboration among the various stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, investors, academia, industry, business support organizations and government. This has led to a fragmented landscape, with initiatives and resources scattered across various institutions and organizations. As a result, entrepreneurs, researchers, and innovators often struggle to access the support and resources they need to develop their ideas and businesses.

Description:

To address such fragmentation, in the context of Lebanon Innovate project, we aim to design and create an Innovation Resource Web Portal (IRP) that is envisioned to become a comprehensive and centralized reference for all ongoing and forthcoming initiatives pertaining to innovation, as well as resources tailored to the needs of the various sectors, including agri-food, health, and digital/CCI.

The portal will serve as a one-stop-shop for all stakeholders looking to learn, cooperate, and identify business or funding opportunities and access resources, directories, and initiatives in the field of IP and knowledge transfer. The portal is to reinforce the innovation ecosystem in Lebanon, enabling knowledge transfer and business collaborations between different stakeholders, and providing access to knowledge and market insights.

Key Features

The concept of the innovation resource portal includes and is not limited to the following features:

1. Knowledge Bank:

A centralized collection of information and resources that are organized and accessible to users. The knowledge bank can contain a wide range of content, including Ideabank, toolkits, videos, infographics, as well as e-courses.

2. News, articles, and Success Stories:

to present a collection of case studies of successful innovations; includes examples of companies or individuals who successfully developed a new product, service, or business model, and the steps they took to achieve success.

3.  Lebanon Ecosystem Interactive Map and directory:

to provide an overview of the innovation ecosystem in Lebanon by pinpointing the locations of the ecosystem support system, including universities, research centers, and business support organizations (BSOs) in Lebanon allowing users to explore the innovation landscape in Lebanon, and helps them to identify potential collaborators, partners, service providers or resources that can support their research or entrepreneurial activities.

4. Research Hub:

to showcase the assets, capabilities and expertise of Lebanese research institutions and universities. The hub will make it easier for local and international researchers and industry professionals to discover and learn about these capabilities, and potentially even spur new collaboration opportunities.

5. Matchmaking Forum and features

serves as a space for individuals and organizations to connect, collaborate and innovate together. This feature serves two purposes:

1- Crowd-solving: Establishing a channel for crowd-solving between industry and researchers or innovators.

2- Networking: Enable peer to peer collaboration between local and international researchers and innovators.

6. Opportunity Center:

to provide a centralized platform that aggregates and curates news on various opportunities available for researchers and innovators including events, competitions, announcements, grants, and other relevant opportunities that could help innovators advance their research or business.

7. Profiling and user creation
8. Dashboard creation and management

Target audience

In this perspective, Lebanon Innovate web portal aims to foster the growth of an innovation ecosystem, targeting the following key stakeholders:

• Universities and research institutions, responsible for knowledge creation and diffusion.
• Researchers in ICT, agrifood, and healthcare areas with commercial inventions, offering opportunities for open innovation in R&D, fostering collaborations and maximizing commercialization potential.
• Incubators and accelerators, providing a supportive environment for innovators and researchers, possibly with physical space and access to technology infrastructure and equipment, besides business and technical assistance.
• Investors, providing financial support to startups and SMEs; government and public institutions, Technology Transfer Offices(TTOs)
• Lebanese Industrialists and Private Sector organizations that may promote a favorable environment for the entire ecosystem through adequate supporting policies and regulations; and
• Entrepreneurs, a core element of an innovation ecosystem, as they are inherently innovative, agile, and adaptive
• Larger corporations: development agencies, intermediaries, and foundations, which may contribute to building connectivity and capacity of the ecosystem actors.
• Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), active at the national and international levels, including the diaspora network; the industry sector, which can collaboratively tackle large-scale socio-economic issues that are hindering the development of new markets and the efficiency of their broader business environments.

This project addresses mainly the following sectors: Agri-food, Healthcare and the ICT/CCI.

Within this context, this EU funded program is led by Berytech in partnership with the Industrial Research Institute (IRI), IRALEB, EBN, Leitat and Anima.

The purpose is to outline the scope of work required to initiate, develop, implement and manage an innovative web interactive platform “’LEBANON INNOVATE” that offers a wide range of features, modules, and applications to foster innovation, collaboration, within its ecosystem:

• Showcasing Lebanon's innovators and innovations locally and globally, highlighting their skills and making it easier for external partners and investors to discover the best offerings from Lebanon.
• Acting as a central hub and support system for innovators and entrepreneurs, providing them with access to a collection of best practices, tools, and practical assistance for their activities.
• Creating communities of collaboration among stakeholders with shared interests in innovation and entrepreneurship and enabling collaboration through matchmaking features.
• Connecting various sectors such as ICT, Agrifood, and Healthcare within Lebanon's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
• Increasing awareness in Lebanon about the importance of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the overall ecosystem.
• Establishing a network of stakeholders to support startups in accelerating their growth and achieving success.
• Educating and guiding  the target audience about intellectual property (IP) development, management, protection and commercialization and its value in protecting innovations.
• Simplifying the process of patent and technology trading to encourage innovation in Lebanon

• Provide a user-friendly interface with various features and modules to promote innovation
• Foster a vibrant and supportive community that encourages participation and engagement.

• Design and develop an intuitive and visually appealing user interface that is accessible across devices and platforms.
• Create a range of features and modules to support collaboration, ideation, resource sharing, and feedback mechanisms. Features would include (but are not limited to)
  • Interactive map with an integrated search, filtering, categorization, and matchmaking function.
  • User Registration: Develop user profiling and registration, including social registration on the portal. Users to be able create their own profile pages and edit their preferences.
  • Community Engagement: Implement mechanisms for user profiles, networking, forums, and gamification elements to encourage active participation and community building.
  • ChatBoxes
  • Social sharing: Enable social sharing of public content on the platform for users to share on other platforms.
  • Matchmaking Module: to facilitate the matchmaking feature of the portal.
  • Searching and browsing: Develop a search and browsing functionality that allows users to search for content across the platform’s databases.
• Different layout designs to support the different types of content across the platform (landing pages, podcast pages, blog posts, profiles, etc…)
• Security and Privacy: Implement robust security measures to protect user data and ensure compliance with relevant data protection regulations, and to have a role-based access control that ensures only authorized administrators can access and perform specific actions within the Admin Panel.
• Manage regular maintenance, changes, and adaptations innovation platform within the program lifetime.
• Tracking visitors, providing regular reporting such as Google Analytics, social reports, and support in repurposing the content strategies and refining/optimizing the platform to reach the needed targets and KPIs.

• Collaborate with the project stakeholders to understand the platform's requirements, goals, and target audience.
• Optimize the platform's performance and responsiveness across various devices and browsers.
• Document technical specifications, code, and project-related information for future reference.
• Ensure the development and implementation of a platform management process including design, technical and content aspects
• Develop the content design, and management process

1. Technology Requirements:
   1. Open Source:

The platform should be running on open-source technologies ensuring dynamic, robust performance and reliability, without being tied up to any specific proprietary software or technology.

1. 2. REST API:

All the portal’s data should be accessible via a RESTAPI to facilitate the integration with different platforms using HTTP Requests, and JSON or XML. Full API documentation is required.

1. 3. Content Management System:

The Content Management System (CMS) is the core software technology of the platform and it is mandatory to provide the following features:

1. • •  Content Creation and Editing :The CMS should support content editing and revising with full revision history of changes and who made them. Compatible for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). A Web form creation tool should be available for creating online forms, polls, etc. Bulk content upload tools are needed to bulk ingest content with rich media formats like text, files, and images. The CMS should be able to generate thumbnails from images and videos automatically. The CMS should support user roles and authorization levels.
     •  User friendly design structure-Template Creation, Design, and Layout: The CMS should provide a page building and layout environment where users can select or drag and drop from a palette of page elements to change page designs without needing to create new templates. Also webmasters should be able to change or switch between different templates from the CMS web admin tool.
     • A search engine or filtering criteria should be available for webmasters to easily find and edit content. Bulk operations on content should also be available. The CMS should provide a preview function for pages/content before publishing the new page/content. The design and templates must be compatible with all major browsers in their current versions with a responsive and adaptive design to support all mobile/tablet browsers. The CMS should provide a way for easily creating visualized charts and maps with points of interests. Charts should be generated with an open-source/free service or library like Google charts, Chart.js, Google maps or OpenStreetMap.
     • Workflow: The CMS should allow social networks-based authentication as well as email signup. It shall explain in details the workflow of adding new content and the permissions to be assigned for each content provider. The CMS should be able to send push notifications through E-mail when there is a content/comment for review. Also the CMS should enable scheduling publishing/un-publishing of content/pages automatically. In case of content edit forms, the CMS should allow inserted data validation such as required fields or allowable types of content by field. The content forms should also expose an easy way to ingest multilingual content.
     • Social Content: The CMS should provide a built-in blogging system which can be easily moderated by users with authorized roles. RSS feeds should be created automatically including each added page/blog post. The CMS should also allow webmasters to open comments on different content types and pages. The comments should be easily moderated. Integration with different social networks to show social site content should be easily configured from the Web admin interface as well as integration with external RSS feeds to automatically fetch, check, and update content. Social sharing icons should also be configurable for any content type or page.
     • Analytics: should implement tracking software to produce user defined portal reports. This may be achieved from within the CMS Web admin tool or a third-party solution. The reporting/analytical tool should allow marketers to determine how content publishing activity impacts portal traffic and where on the portal to publish new content. The CMS should also provide marketers the ability to retain URLs when changes are made.
     • User Pages: Each subscriber/user shall have own customized profile page. The template of this profile page is to be defined based on user role. The profile page should reflect important details about the user as well as links to his/her public assets.
     • Integrations and APIs: The CMS should expose all content through APIs. It should provide access to all CMS entities like content pieces, pages profiles, etc. APIs should be secured by a set of permissions that can allow public or private integrations. The provider should provide a documentation of all available APIs and sample integration code.
2.  Hosting, System Requirements and Regular Maintenance   :
   1. Cloud-Based Hosting Solution:
      • • shall recommend the hosting provider ensuring the security and stability of the platform.
        • A detailed price forecast shall be included to forecast the monthly/yearly fees for the service based on the average number of subscribers and visitors.
   2. The Platform should be totally built on top of open-source technologies and doesn't require any extra proprietary licenses or licenses from third parties
   3. Updates and upgrades roadmap for next 2 years to be communicated 

• Strong track record as a web developer agency, preferably with experience in building innovative platforms or web applications.
• Proficiency in web development languages and frameworks, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and popular front-end frameworks (e.g., React, Angular, or Vue.js).
• Strong understanding of responsive design principles and cross-browser compatibility.
• Experience with back-end development and working with server-side technologies (e.g., Node.js, Python, or PHP, etc.).
• Familiarity with databases and database management systems (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB,etc.).
• Able to commit and has the right team to manage the platform and ensure its maintenance and development for the project lifetime.

The expected deliverables include:

1. Platform Conceptualization, Research & Benchmarking, Specifications Development:

• Detailed project plan and timeline for platform design, development, execution and maintenance.
• Wireframes, mock-ups, and prototypes of the user interface design.

2. Implementation / Platform Design & Development: UX/UI Design, Web Development, Copywriting

• Fully functional innovation platform with the agreed-upon features and modules.
• Integration of multiple payment methods with appropriate security measures. (Optional)
• Regular progress updates on development tasks and milestones.
• Coordination with the program team
• Documentation and user guides for platform administration, management, and end-users.
• Training sessions or materials for platform administrators.

3. Platform maintenance

• Ongoing technical support and maintenance/management for the platform.
• Track visitors activity on the platform using analytics and tracking tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Hotjar…)

The estimated timeline for the project is as follows:

• Initiation and Planning: August 2023-October 2023
• Deployment and Launch of first version (MVP): Fall 2023
• Development and finalization of the platform: Spring 2024 (to be coordinated and split into multiple milestones)
• Ongoing Support and Maintenance: August 2023-July 2026