Monitoring and Managing Disruptions

Monitoring and Managing Disruptions is the 5th factor of the series, 6 Factors to Improve Innovation in the GCC Region.

What happened to countries such as Greece and Ireland or companies such as Kodak, Nokia, and blockbuster are not unfamiliar to us anymore. Trends are shifting very fast and people are switching their interests, lifestyle, and actions accordingly.

We are in an era where we pay 400bd for a laptop in one day where it gets outdated in the upcoming 6 months. We used to buy our tickets and hotel reservations from local travel agencies while nowadays we prefer getting them online. We used to pay in cash yet now we are more into paying with credit cards or applications such as Benefit Pay.

Try not to be astounded if someday fiat currencies have lost their trust and people switched to trading with gold or if cryptocurrencies have been adapted around the world.

New ideas, beliefs, strategies, and technologies can emerge and change our whole viewpoint on observing things how we used to see them.

A study by Future Foresight Foundation in Abudhabi entitles “JOBS OF THE FUTURE 2040” has revealed that many of the current jobs exist nowadays will be outdated in the future while automation can be practiced on 45%-50% of all the jobs exist in the UAE market today.

The study was dedicated to forecast and prepare a roadmap for Generation Alpha giving insights into different types of expertise required to cope with the market in the future. 

When a disruption occurs, it affects the entire culture opening the door for new opportunities and closing the gate forever on others. 

As a productive node belonging to a larger ecosystem, you should monitor and manage disruptions to sustain your progress and the functionality of your node.

Let’s take a larger node such as the government for an example. In GCC countries, most of the country’s income was based on the oil industry. It’s a matter of fact that the oil will not last forever or even worst, some of the major industries based on oil are shifting gradually to more convenient and environment-friendly alternatives.

A lot of initiatives were made in the fields of alternative energy, tourism, banking and finance, real estate and recently simplifying foreign investment and entrepreneurship to create and improve other sources of income. 

A study by Worldbank.org in 2019 have revealed the percentage of non-oil sectors contributing to their GDP in GCC countries, Kingdom of Bahrain 82%, UAE 70%, Oman 59%, Saudi Arabia 57%, Qatar 53%, and Kuwait with 48% being the most oil-dependent country in the GCC region. 

From the figures above, it’s obvious that the Hydro-carbonic industry is still playing the main factor in countries such as Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia while the Non-Carbonic industries mostly reside in services industries or a minimum of sectors such as alternative energy, manufacturing, infrastructure, logistics, Fintech, and fisheries.

All of those figures were before the Covid-19 pandemic. The situation is much worst now as the culture was disrupted again to provide a lot more challenges to the table that were not in the equation before.

 It’s important to ask ourselves the following questions,

Are we aware of the current trends and disruptions and did we forecast future transformations based on proper research?

Monitoring and managing disruptions are essential in the current market circumstances. For example, investing in 4G technologies while 5G will be out a few months later will cause crisis and bankruptcy especially if the trends life cycle were not kept in consideration.

A model I have created a few months ago “Corona Marketing” published on Forbes Middle East website can assist marketers, business developers or even economist to consider disruptions in their future studies.

Are we tackling the right solutions focusing on long-term strategies or we are only trying to fill the current gaps in the market?

This is a very critical question as it will define the scope of the entire initiatives. It can be a mixture of both; however, the optimum goal is to focus on long-term goals keeping short-term goals for necessity. For example, to create an automotive engine industry in the Kingdom of Bahrain we need to prepare the infrastructure, capable HR, and allocate proper research materials, tools, budget, and regulations to turn the concept into a reality.

Do we have enough local and regional human resources to proceed with our long-term strategies or we will be relying on foreign expertise?

Here, we will refer to all the previous factors discussed thus far. If we do not yet have enough local and regional expertise, we need to work first on building the infrastructure and scale up our student and HR knowledge base to fit the new context. As mentioned above, all the nodes should work hand in hand to build the optimal foundation.

So in a nutshell, disruptions are something that the society should utilize and let it work for them and not against them through innovative thinking, up to date research, unique strategies, and what we will be discussing in the final factor, level 5 leaderships.