infoDev, a donor-funded ICT for development agency hosted by the World Bank, has formed a public/private partnership with the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and Nokia to undertake a joint program on Creating Sustainable Businesses for the Knowledge Economy, worth some €12 million, that will run from 2010 – 2012.
This request for expressions of interest (EOI) concerns Track 1A of the program, on the establishment of regional mobile applications labs in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA). As the implementing agency for the program, infoDev is looking to hire a consultant firm to help develop, in phase 1, a business plan that will help the future labs (in all three regions) to achieve sustainability following the two to three years during which they will be recipients of grant funding. In phase 2, the consultant firm may be invited to provide mentoring and technical assistance to the labs. This first phase contract is for a fixed price study, with an estimated cost of US$120’000, for the development of the business plan concept.
The services to be offered by the lab include:
1. Training and accreditation for mobile applications developers.
2. Certification of applications and facilities for developers to test applications under operational conditions.
3. Fostering competition for ideas among applications developers.
4. Business mentoring to assist applications developers with bringing their ideas to market. In this sense, the Labs could serve as specialized business incubators.
5. Replication of successful applications, between countries, languages and operating systems.
6. Developing a repository of knowledge in ICT4D.
7. Conducting consumer behaviour research.
8. Facilitating access to finance and access to markets.
The consultant firm will deliver a report with six modules covering an analysis of existing mobile applications labs, a typology of labs, recommendations on strategy to be adopted and services to be offered, identification of potential revenue streams, recommendations on how the labs should prepare and equip themselves and identification of a likely client base for the labs. For more information on this request for EOIs, see the website at: /en/Publication.831.html.
This request was awarded to Vital Wave Consulting, INC.