Innovate To Investigate

The “Innovate to Investigate” incubator is a cross-sector and cross-border project where Arab participants - instead of working parallelly - come together to think, brainstorm, and ultimately work to produce investigations in innovative ways.

This incubator is a new perspective to investigative journalism in the region. Participants will collaborate and think together of innovative ways of storytelling and reporting.

The foundation of the “Innovate to Investigate” incubator was built on a scientific and realistic approach; as we believe in the importance of capacity building, the journey will only be completed through hands-on training. Training sessions will cover different topics to equip the participants with the right skills and tools that will assist them in producing innovative investigations in the incubator.

Based on what the participants learned in the training phase, they will split into groups where each group will work on producing an investigation. First-phase participants will collaborate to produce investigations that will be published in Arabic language platforms.

The capacity building stage is the building block in the incubator program. .

looking forward to developing the skills and knowledge of the participants to assist them in the production of their investigations, starting from a hypothesis until they get the final digital interactive form.

Equipping the participants with up-to-date skills, familiarizing them with new knowledge and technologies, modern production strategies, that are built based on the perspective of the target audience, through a series of training sessions, webinars, and practical workshops.

The second stage “Capacity Building” is very sensitive, as team members will work together, according to the timeline of the team's goal. In our small innovative incubator, our schedule is relatively short to produce an innovative, interactive, cross-border investigation.

Each team will:

• Establish ground rules
• Set a timeline
• Determine the goal in accordance with the team characteristics (strengths, weaknesses, and timeline)
• Distribute tasks
• Determine the internal communication method
• Determine the tools used and methods to accomplish tasks
• Create a tracking/follow-up system
• Determine methods of decision making
• Agree on internal and external meetings

Whichafter the teams will be ready to move towards their goal, ensuring success by taking all necessary steps and agreeing on all the details.

In the "Innovate to Investigation"; journalism incubator, we provide coaches in the editorial, fact checking, legal and front-end development fields. With these fields, participants will be able to provide information avoiding legal issues, is correct and realistic, supportive of the desired content, and in line with the presentation method and investigation design, ensuring that the content and material support the visual and interactive appearance that designer is looking for to reach a wider audience.

In this stage, the teams reap the fruits of their efforts.