Employees in the Middle East are highly likely to perceive their firms as innovative, according to a new survey from the job search website Bayt.com.
Significant numbers of respondents in the online poll agreed that their companies kept up to date with other organisations in their field, adopted best practices and followed long-term innovation strategies.
More than 80 per cent agreed that their companies encouraged employees to pitch ideas, and a similar number said that employers involved consumers in innovation.
“The numbers [show] that … firms in Middle East are internally perceived as process-innovative”, said Samreen Malik, an associate professor of economics at New York University Abu Dhabi. Process innovation is the development and implementation of new methods of production and delivery.
In 2013, the UAE was ranked 38th in the world for innovation by the World Intellectual Property Association (Wipo) – the highest ranking of any country in the Middle East.
This was largely due to the UAE’s high scores on metrics for business sophistication and infrastructure. The UAE also was among the top 10 countries in terms of creating new organisations, and use of IT, according to the ranking.
However, the UAE scored relatively poorly on measures related to knowledge creation. For patents per billion dollars of GDP, a common measure of the rate of innovation, the UAE was ranked 58th in the world, while it was ranked 112th for the number of citable scientific and technical articles published. These are proxy measures of higher education’s contribution to economic growth, and the basis for many technological improvements.
The Wipo’s ranking was based on indicators from a number of sources including the UN, the World Bank, Reuters and IHS Global Insight.
Building a knowledge-based economy, in which the oil and gas sector would account for a smaller share of the economy than knowledge and skills-intensive industries, forms the main objective of the UAE Government’s Vision 2030 development plan.
Ms Malik said “continuous and rapid innovation in every aspect of the economy” is the key to maintaining the country’s relative position.
“It is only … continuous, successful innovation in every aspect of the business environment in the economy that can result [in] positive economic growth,” she said.
The survey polled 6,268 individuals in the Middle East between November 18 and December 20 last year.
“It is important for organisations to create a culture that fosters and rewards innovation,” said Suhail Masri, a vice president at bayt.com. “Companies stand to benefit from giving their staff the freedom, tools, encouragement and flexibility to ask new questions, seek new answers and experiment in new ways.”
abouyamourn@thenational.ae
