The news that Dubai will invest Dh4.5 billion in an innovation hub for global technology businesses and entrepreneurs is further evidence of the diversification of our economy away from its dependence on oil and gas. It is also a sign of forward thinking in that it will harness the power of the country's greatest resource – the people – on projects that just might change the world.
The initiative will have an impressive physical presence in the form of a 150,000 square metre centre of communication and technology. But the key to its success won’t be in bricks and mortar, it will be in the ideas that emerge and the projects that are given the time, space and funding to develop. While it is expected to attract people and companies from across the region and the world, it is crucially important that it supports Emirati innovators and entrepreneurs. And that starts with the education system.
California’s famed Silicon Valley would not have become a tech-business powerhouse had it not been for its proximity to Stanford University. It was there that graduates William Hewlett and David Packard first worked together in the 1950s, eventually creating the Hewlett-Packard computer giant. More than 40 years later, Sergey Brin and Larry Page started working in Stanford’s computer science laboratory on what they described as “a new architecture for data mining”. We now know that project as Google.
Likewise, Dubai’s new innovation hub will need to work hand-inhand with the education system. That system, from preschool to tertiary level, must be geared to encourage innovation. It must be flexible enough to encourage students to dream and structured enough to give them the intellectual and physical tools they will need to bring those dreams to fruition. It must challenge students to do their best, but it must also provide them with the space for trial and error, because mistakes are an important part of the creative process.
Just as it would have been impossible 25 years ago to describe Google to a person who hadn’t even used the internet, it is impossible to say what may emerge from the Dubai hub. All we know is that investment in ideas and the people who have them is essential for any forward-looking country. And, as the UAE has demonstrated so many times in so many fields, if anybody can do it, we can.
