Global Enterprise Monitor: Exploratory Kick-off in Western Africa
The grant request helped to support a Swiss-Western African scientific workshop at the University of Ouagadougou 2, Burkina Faso, in spring 2015 for 3 full days. The scientific workshop was intended to gather Swiss scientists and Western African scientists from Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Senegal and Morocco and explored in depth a possible methodology to produce high level scientific articles and publications from an ongoing Global Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM) applied research and reporting project implemented for the first time in Francophone Western Africa in four countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Morocco, Senegal).
The GEM Survey is standardized worldwide for the 60 countries, including Switzerland, where a national entrepreneurship survey is conducted on an annual basis. Each national GEM report produces an impressive amount of quantitative and qualitative data on domestic entrepreneurship capacities and ongoing activities. lt’s then consolidated at the global level by the GEM Global (which is a nongovernmental organization) based at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
As the GEM national surveys as quantitative and qualitative surveys are not conceived to produce scientific materials such as research articles and other types of research publications, the collected data can be used to do so if appropriate methods and selection of possible contents are explored and implemented.
In this context, the proposed workshop will be designed in such a way to explore precise research methods and possible contents to valorise, also scientifically, the newly collected and compiled GEM national survey data collected in the four Western African countries as new member countries participating in the GEM since 2014-15.
The objectives of the workshop are as follows:
- Define standardized research methods to exploit the quantitative data collected in the four national surveys and valorize such data to be inserted in scientific articles and other scientific publications.
PhilippeRegnier, School of Management Fribourg (HEG-Fr), Fribourg, Philippe.
Florent Song-Naba, Faculty of Economics and Management, University Ouaga, Burkina Faso