What’s Missing In Our National Innovation Ecosystem?

“Do you support us entrepreneurs in finding innovative ideas or only in implementing the innovative ideas that we already have?”

Frankly, before this question, I thought of myself as the superman of answering tricky inquiries. As the manager of the national innovation ecosystem activation program, I was singing songs to the entrepreneurs of Saudi Arabia about the fabulous ecosystems their country has until the aforementioned question slapped me in my face. The shock that I discovered was that the ecosystem, which I thought to be complete, appeared to be leaning mysteriously toward supporting existing innovations rather than supporting the ideation of new ones. That means our national ecosystem tends to rescue sunken sailors but only after they reach the shore!

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I – My false perception of the ecosystem

I think the story started in 2020 when launching the program mentioned in the introduction. My team and I started scanning the popular entities in Saudi Arabia that innovators seek services from. We listed hundreds of these entities under many classifications. Finally, we published the services of more than 100 of them on the National Business Innovation Platform (Fikra.SA). When I tried to model all of these entities in the simplest classification possible, I remodeled the models published in the literature and reached the model that is in the diagram below.

The model consists of three types of entities that support innovators in the country:

·??????Information Providers: Entities that offer to innovators market-related data and business consultancy

·??????Service Providers: Entities that offer various business enablement services to innovators, such as IP protection, governmental licenses, incubation, prototyping, etc.

·??????Money Providers: Entities that offer financial resources through lending, investing, or buying innovators’ products and services

For a period of time after publishing the above model, I felt that it was adequate to cover the list of entities that support innovators across the nation. Nevertheless, I discovered later on that it is not about covering the list of existing entities; it’s about covering the innovator’s entire lifecycle.

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II- From Idle to Idol

Before being able to shed light on the blind spots in our ecosystem, I had to fly like a helicopter and see what was on the ground from a strategic point of view. So, bear with me, and give me a chance to take a few steps back.

First, I hope you can allow me to assume that “innovating” refers to the process of achieving commercial benefits through creating or adopting an idea that is new to the innovator’s enterprise, market, or the entire world. Although this simplified definition covers a lot, it puts most governmental and social innovations aside in today’s discussion. Second, let’s accept for a while that the term “innovator” may refer to a person, a team, or an enterprise. Finally, let’s agree that the complete lifecycle for an innovator starts somewhere before reaching the innovative idea and ends somewhere after commercializing it. If these three assumptions make sense to you, then I think the following simplification of the innovator’s lifecycle might get your attention.

As shown in the above diagram, I have remodeled some of the published models of innovators’ journeys into 5 stages with 4 steps in between them. To understand the less-supported segments in the innovators’ lifecycle, let me walk you through my Ix9 Innovator’s Funnel as follows.

1 – Idle Stage: Includes the large pool of people and enterprises that have their basic levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs satisfied. Nonetheless, their interest in innovation is zero.

2 – Inquiring Step: Represents activities that the person or enterprise performs to understand the world of innovating and to be attracted to it.

3 – Intention Stage: Contains people and enterprises that decide to pursue the journey of innovating but don’t know what or how to innovate.

4 – Ideating Step: Consists of the activities the innovator performs to create or borrow a suitable innovative idea.

5 – Invention Stage: People and enterprises that have clear and practical innovative ideas regardless of whether they are patentable or not. However, they haven’t taken any steps yet to benefit commercially from these ideas.

6 – Implementing Step: All of the activities the innovator performs to turn the innovative idea from a theoretical design into a project that generates commercial benefits.

7 – Income Stage: Innovators have succeeded in gaining commercial benefits from implementing their ideas by themselves or through their partners and clients. The commercial benefits include, but are not limited to, increasing revenues or brand value or decreasing current expenses or losses.

8 – Inspiring Step: This step represents the activities that successful innovators perform to motivate other people and enterprises to leave the Idle Stage and to pursue the innovation journey.

9 – Idol Stage: No one can reach this stage except the few successful innovators that became well-known icons in the innovation world. Examples of idol innovators include Abu Al Qasim Al Zahrawi (a.k.a. Albucasis), who innovated Operative Surgery, and Apple, which innovated the world of smartphones.

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III- Blind spots within the ecosystem

When I compared the four steps mentioned in Part II with the three classifications of the Saudi ecosystem’s entities mentioned in Part I, it was clear to me that most of the innovator-supporting entities focus on supporting only one step of the journey, the Implementing Step! I reached this conclusion after wearing the hat of an entrepreneur in Saudi Arabia and trying to find convincing answers to the following simple questions.

Q1. What entities are educating and motivating me to decide to start my own innovation journey (Inquiring Step)?

Q2. What entities offer to support my business to create or adopt the right innovative ideas, even if I don’t have anything in my mind currently (Ideating Step)?

Q3. What entities will support me in turning the innovative idea that I have created or adopted into a commercially beneficial project (Implementing Step)?

Q4. What entities will work with me in reaching other entrepreneurs and motivating them to start innovating based on my success story (Inspiring Step)?

If you tried to answer these four questions yourself, your answers might differ from mine, but I believe I have found reasonably convincing answers for Q3 and none for the others. I might focus on the gaps represented by Q1 and Q4 in other articles, or perhaps you can help the country and take the lead in investigating them, my dear reader. However, I will direct the spotlight on Q2 for the remainder of this article because it relates to the question that slapped me in the face in the beginning.

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IV- Blind spots within the blind spots

I don’t want to exaggerate or deny all of the current efforts in the country designed to help people and enterprises create or adopt innovative ideas, but if you wear the black hat and look at them with me, you will understand my concerns.

In Saudi Arabia, we have educational programs and summer camps for creating STEM innovative ideas, and we have research and development centers that were have granted hundreds of patents for new innovative ideas. Nonetheless, the former group is limited to students, and the latter is mostly limited to academics and large corporations. With respect to adopting innovative ideas, we have good centers specializing in a number of emerging and Industry 4.0 technologies, but they are still limited in capacity and coverage. Last but not least, we have two-day hackathons, which lack the adequate frequency and depth to generate market-changing ideas.

But wait! Let’s forget about these aforementioned limitations for a moment and read again the definition we agreed on in Part II, which was as follows:

Innovating: The process of achieving commercial benefits through creating or adopting an idea that is new to the innovator’s enterprise, market, or the entire world.

If you compare this definition with the ideating-supporting services I have just listed, then do you agree that they are biased more toward technological innovative ideas compared to other types of innovative ideas?

Before asking me what the other types are, allow me to briefly define my classification for the types of innovative ideas based on their scientific sources, and I will continue my point afterward.

A – Technological Innovative Ideas: These are innovative ideas belonging clearly to one of the natural sciences, engineering and medical disciplines, such as ideas related to astrophysics, cybersecurity, radiology and so on.

B – Managerial Innovative Ideas: These include the innovative ideas that have direct relationships to the management, business and economics disciplines, such as ideas related to business models, marketing methods and behavioral economics.

C – Cultural Innovative Ideas: These consist of the innovative ideas that deal with the concepts related to culture, arts, entertainment, and sports disciplines, such as ideas related to cooking, fashion, games, internal design and movies.

You don’t have to tell me, my beloved reader, that some famous innovative ideas mix more than one of the three types above. They do and they should in order to increase their level of innovativeness, but distinguishing between them as in the list above helps me, you and policymakers identify the gaps. In other words, if I have a coffee shop, and I want to innovate ideas that could enable me to compete with Starbucks, then I know where to find support to help me invent an intelligent coffee maker that uses a dozen emerging technologies. On the contrary, I don’t know where to find support to help me innovate my own method of dynamic pricing, profit sharing, or network marketing or to innovate my own dessert recipes or cultural theme. Consequently, my available choice will be scanning the managerial and cultural practices in famous coffee shops around the world and copying whatever I can.

V – My new perception of the ecosystem

Based on the analysis summarized in Parts III and IV, an ecosystem that supports innovators in the Ideating and Implementing steps must include four national systems, as illustrated in the following diagram:

1-???Technological Innovations’ Ideating Enablers (TIIE): A system of entities that offer people and enterprises the required knowledge, resources and assets to enable them to create technological innovative ideas or to choose wisely the right technological innovative ideas for adoption from the ones that were created by other local or foreign innovators.

2-???Managerial Innovations’ Ideating Enablers (MIE): This system will also offer the required knowledge, resources and assets but to enable the creation or the adoption of managerial innovative ideas.

3-???Cultural Innovations’ Ideating Enablers (CIE): Similar to the previous two systems, this one concerns innovative cultural ideas.

4-???Innovation Implementation Enablers (IIE): A system that includes the information providers, service providers and money providers that I mentioned in Part I. The entities belonging to this system await people or enterprises that have clear original or adopted innovative ideas, either technological, managerial, cultural, or a mix of one or more of them. These entities will offer the required information, services and money to enable the commercial implementation of the ideas.

Please don’t overthink the diagram above because the path that the future innovator would use in this new ecosystem, if it is established, will not be straightforward and in a single direction. On the contrary, different innovators will take different paths back and forth between these four systems until they reach commercial success.

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VI – My Recommendations

Though I must declare to you, my beloved reader, that I belong to the SMEs General Authority, whose board is chaired by the minister of commerce, I am only representing myself and not my organization in the following five recommendations, which I will raise one day to the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA).

1-???Launching a permanent ministerial committee that includes all of the ministers responsible for enabling entities for ideating technological innovations and led by the minister of communications and information technology. I think a large portion of this first recommendation has been done already after launching the Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Supreme Committee, establishing the RDI Authority, and developing the RDI National Strategy. Nevertheless, these great moves are still at the beginning.

2-???Including all of the ministers responsible for the enabling entities for ideating managerial innovations, launching a permanent ministerial committee led by the minister of commerce. This committee should include the SMEs General Authority and decision-makers who can represent all of management, business and economics-related colleges, institutes, societies and foundations.

3-???Led by the minister of culture, launching a permanent ministerial committee that includes all of the ministers responsible for the enabling entities for ideating cultural innovations. This committee should include the Ministry of Tourism, the Ministry of Sport and the General Entertainment Authority as well as decision-makers who represent culture, arts, entertainment and sport-related colleges, institutes, societies, clubs and foundations.

4-???Establishing a permanent ministerial committee led by the minister of commerce and including all of the ministers responsible for the enabling entities for implementing innovations. Even though the National Innovation Ecosystem Activation Program (mentioned in Part I) and a few other government programs have done a good job of gathering information about a wide range of services and finance providers across the Saudi entrepreneurship market, and despite having a ministerial committee for ease of doing business and another for digital entrepreneurship and a new national strategy for SMEs, the picture of innovation commercialization enablement is still blurry, and the aforementioned components are not working together as a harmonic system, at least not from my point of view.

5-???Launching the National Innovation Portal (Innovate.SA) to be a one-stop shop for innovators and the entities of the Saudi innovation ecosystem. This e-services portal and online market should smooth the unpredictable paths that innovators can take between the four systems (mentioned in Part V) and provide real-time data about the health of the ecosystem and its gaps and bottlenecks. For the portal to do so, it must have incentives for both innovators and enablers to continuously use it and an enormous awareness army that will put a marketing booth for (Innovate.SA) in every university and shopping mall.

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VII – Final Thoughts

Forgive me, dear reader, for I have sinned!

First, I confess that I have oversimplified the challenges facing our ecosystem in order to guarantee that LinkedIn won’t kick me out of the platform for writing more in this already long article. Nevertheless, I believe deep in my heart that taking serious actions toward my five recommendations might award me with the perfect answer for the embarrassing question I shared with you in the beginning if my daughter Sama asked it in the future. This might also solve the Saudi dilemma of not having enough innovative projects in the pipeline. Thus, the proposed ecosystem may increase it dramatically, and later on, “quantity leads to quality”, as many experts in the field know.

Finally, I confess that I couldn’t find an identical twin to the next-to-impossible national innovation ecosystem I have proposed above within any of the developing economies during my non-extensive scan of the literature, but for a citizen who is crazy about making his nation the most innovative one on Earth by 2030, should I care about that?

P.S.

I have avoided on purpose citing all of the references that I have brought all of the information of this article from to keep its informal flow and avoid turning it into an academic one. Nonetheless, feel free to request the source of any information mentioned, and I’ll be more than happy to share it with you ASAP.