Realizing the Vision: Research, development and innovation mandates in the GCC

Today, every country in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) has developed a national vision or strategy that looks into a post-oil future and imagines a thriving knowledge-based economy with globally competitive skills and capabilities in a few priority sectors. A recurring theme across all these national vision documents is a focus on improving the research, development and innovation (RDI) ecosystem. To appropriately support the development of their RDI ecosystems, GCC countries must create a national agenda around which these activities can flourish. This must involve first identifying and focusing on priority sectors with high value-added growth potential. Once these sectors have been identified, policy-makers, academia and the private sector must answer the question: how can RDI most effectively be exploited to generate optimal benefits for society and the economy?

Moving towards a knowledge-based economy and creating a culture of innovation requires an effective RDI ecosystem with prominent roles for universities, industry, government, and civil society. It requires an appreciation of the role that RDI plays in national growth. It requires a rich vein of basic research that transforms into applied research, and that in turn leads to the development and commercialization of new technologies and business advancements.

This research, and its commercialization, enables countries to both develop a knowledge-based economy and create competitive advantages within particular economic sectors. One effective way of doing this is creating a national reserach and development (R&D) mandate.

National RDI Mandate

A national RDI mandate defines an ambitious, tangible, long-term target for the country and steers public policy and institutions to work towards and deliver the target. The most famous example of a national R&D mandate is President John F. Kennedy’s Apollo program, which aimed to put a man on the moon. The mandate focused the energies of the state, academia, and the private sector towards delivering a visible, tangible, and ambitious national goal and generated excitement and advances across disciplines and industries.

RDI mandates strengthen innovation ecosystems and make them more competitive. While the mandate depends on national priorities, its goal is simple: enable rapid advances across science and technology and make the nation a global leader in a specific area. Mandates create a specific national objective, establish coordination among government entities, increase collaboration with industry and define relevant budgetary and financial allocations.

Nations have also enacted RDI mandates to establish themselves as leaders in new science and technology sectors of global interest and within the past few years have begun to compete for leadership in artificial intelligence (AI) R&D. An executive order was signed in the United States mandating federal agencies to increase their research and development focus on relevant use cases for artificial intelligence and promoting sustained investment in AI RDI with industry, academic and international partners.¹

Enacting a clear RDI mandate with a focus on a specific economic priority sector will enable this type of collaboration in multiple ways. Actors within RDI working in parallel will better recognize the importance and necessity of collaborating to generate innovative ideas and solve challenging problems. As RDI improves and matures within the sector, companies will increasingly recognize the strength of R&D in the sector and become more interested in partnering with university researchers for their own R&D activities. As the private sector becomes more involved in RDI and recognizes the value of utilizing GCC resources, research in GCC countries is likely to become increasingly demand-led and financed by industry. 

An RDI mandate will also enable greater cross-governmental collaboration, as government entities must align their goals and priorities in order to work towards achieving a shared, tangible target. Government entities may also recognize the benefits of reviewing current incentives and protection measures to encourage the private sector to become more responsive to market needs and more efficient through innovative propositions and business models.