ABU DHABI // The Abu Dhabi government is investing in innovation centres to create sustainable jobs for Emiratis in aerospace, defence and security.
Local and international universities and businesses met at Khalifa University on Tuesday to discuss ways to help budding entrepreneurs.
“We’re trying to contribute to the set-up, from research to the commercialisation and the creation of new ventures,” said Enrico Villa, director of enterprise development and innovation at the Abu Dhabi Technology Development Committee. “The idea is that there is a role to be played by the government to make transitions from education to full-fledged research institutes. Khalifa University is at the forefront of this, but, in this early stage, we see a role for the government to play.”
Experts from global innovation centres attended the meeting.
“The aim for Abu Dhabi is to maximise the use of human resources here and to create high value and sustainable jobs for Emiratis,” said Ben Shaw, director of finance for new ventures at the Cambridge Innovation Centre in Boston. “Innovation is important because it’s really the start-ups that create jobs. In the US, they created three million jobs a year while existing companies lost a million jobs a year in the same time-frame, so building that is absolutely critical if you want to develop an economy like Abu Dhabi.”
He said collaboration and capital flowing between companies were needed.
“This dynamism has created a whole new level of innovation and it’s much more rapid and capital-efficient,” Mr Shaw said. “Proximity is also very important. People who work on the same floor are 30 times more likely to collaborate than people on different floors, according to a study by the University of Arizona. You get a shared sense of purpose and people wanting to build things that are bigger than themselves and that’s how you get innovation.”
According to The Global Competitiveness Report 2013-14, the UAE ranked 28th in innovation, compared to the UK’s 12th and the US’s seventh, with no government programmes to support patent filing or registration. On Monday, Dubai announced it would invest Dh4.5 billion to turn the emirate into a hub for entrepreneurs.
Khalifa University has centres that are starting to grow.
“The aerospace and innovation centre is working on composites at the moment but that can expand from aircraft to many other uses of composites,” said Dr Keith Jones, the university’s director of industry engagement and technology transfer, and holder of three US patents. “The Etisalat British Telecom innovation centre is being creative by producing 25 patents over the last two years, while the Semiconductor Research Institute produced a patent every two weeks for the past two months. We also have the Robotics Institute so we have the raw material and there is a significant amount of research going on at the university.”
In the past six months, the university has applied for nine patents, and received two.
“This is accelerating,” Dr Jones said. “So in the next three months, I think we can double that. We’re building patent portfolios for products like the atomic force microscope probes to better look at things at a much smaller scale.
“We have the talent, now we need the space, entrepreneurs and funding.”
But the concept and challenge of risk are yet to be appreciated.
“What I think we’re lacking is people who are not afraid to fail. Failure isn’t looked at as something good, so people feel safer working in bigger companies,” said Dr Amr Elchouemi, manager of research promotion in higher education at the Abu Dhabi Education Council.
cmalek@thenational.ae
