6 Factors to Improve Innovation in the GCC Region

The 6 Factors to improve innovation in the GCC region comprise a series of articles aimed at providing insights into the various components that might be limiting our progress towards innovation.

In the upcoming series of articles, we will tackle 6 different factors that can improve innovation in the GCC region. We will be going through the definition and importance of innovation, parenthood and its direct effect on future generations, developing a dynamic educational ecosystem, understanding self-dependency in society, monitoring and managing disruptions as well as preparing the next level 5 leaderships.

Our GCC region has improved dramatically in the past decades. According to Zaid Awad in his article The Five Industry Sectors Keeping the GCC on the Global Map, the GCC region is known globally in the fields of energy and power, transport and logistics, health care, retail, and real estate.

In addition, fields such as banking and finance, marketing, insurance, entrepreneurship, visual, and performing arts are getting much more attention compared to a few decades ago.

However, when it comes to the other side of the equation, we are still falling under the late majority category, coming up short on a recognizable measure of novelty, creations, discoveries, expertise, and talents.

This is not another Covid-19 blog as we will be discussing factors that are affecting our society way before the pandemic. However, the Covid-19 has opened our eyes to a new school of thought. People around the world realized that they are too dependent on each other.

As airports stopped to operate and some countries became partly isolated, people found that they could not even manufacture their basic needs for masks, drugs, or even retain their business status or economic conditions.

Governments and societies around the world are trying their best to sustain their health, resources, businesses, and jobs even at an individual level. It replicates one of the best scenarios of how societies around the world collaborated hand in hand towards a greater goal.

On the other hand, we have discovered that we are not prepared for the unexpected and that existing societies are not capable of facing significant disturbances.

To improve innovation in any society, we need to have a strong balance between a global ecosystem and self-dependency.

In the past two decades, we saw a lot of initiatives that build up a few blocks of success to end up waiting for a miracle to move the progress forward. In contrast, we have a few success stories that everyone else wants to clone or replicate. A lot of speeches, events, and awareness sessions all over the GCC in the last few years but the progress is really slow and the achievements are barely noticeable.

How many speeches and awareness-raising sessions we need to move forward towards execution?!

There are few promising initiatives by all the GCC countries that vary in quantity, scale, and effectiveness to spread awareness, enhances research, support education, and invest in entrepreneurship such as Tamkeen in Bahrain, RPDC Innovations in Saudi Arabia, and Mohamed bin Zayed University for Artificial Intelligence in UAE, Qatar Foundation in Qatar, KFAS in Kuwait, and the Research Council in Oman.

Governments, academic institutions, innovation hubs, and the few research centers available are doing their utmost to build a strong infrastructure to create a well-defined ecosystem. Nevertheless, the ecosystem is not well integrated where certain nodes are absent and other nodes are too weak to carry out their tasks.

Sometimes we have great ideas, insatiable hopes, and the will of fire to break through a new world of learning, achievement, and success, to find ourselves stuck in the middle of a process that lacks knowledge, expertise, and tons of resources to end up blaming other entities for our failure.

We pay attention to what other people have done and apprise them while we are not ready to improve ourselves and suppress their achievements. In fact, when we require something, we end up approaching other societies as we are not able to achieve it ourselves.

It doesn’t mean that we need to be 100% self-dependent to survive. However, we need to achieve the balance between our strengths and weaknesses in terms of our core needs, unique deliverables, financial resources, and capable expertise.

Various components may influence the progression of innovation in current society. The following set of articles will present the 6 factors that I believe might improve the framework of innovation in our dearest GCC nations whenever followed accurately.

In the next article “Understanding Innovation“, we will define and understand the concept of innovation and clear any confusion that might exist. Moreover, we will explain the fact of why innovation is important in our ongoing disrupted world?