Dubai - The Epicenter of Modern Innovation

A Guide to Implementing Innovation Strategies

William R. Kennedy, Aaron G. Amacher, Gregory C. McLaughlin

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781315350813
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

International and global in nature, Dubai - The Epicenter of Modern Innovation: A Guide to Implementing Innovation Strategies provides a roadmap for the successful implementation of innovation for companies and businesses currently working in the Middle East, the UAE, and more specifically, Dubai. The discussion focuses on implementing sustained innovation success within several industry segments, while identifying past, current, and future innovation-related successes that are leading to Dubai's rise as the epicenter of innovation in the Middle East and most notably, the world. The authors share key innovation leadership philosophies from Sheikh Mohammed bin Al Maktoum, recognized business leaders, and the highest levels in the UAE.

This book:

• Features key leadership and innovation insights relative from the highest levels of government, including Sheikh Mohammed bin Al Maktoum and multiple UAE ministry officials.
• Focuses on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), most specifically, Dubai and the Nation's preparation for hosting World Expo 2020.
• Contains numerous examples of past, present, and future innovations in Dubai.
• Provides an easy to implement innovation process management methodology, which has been tested to work in various businesses and organizations.
• Authored by individuals who have 'on the ground' experience living and working with the chief architects of Dubai's innovation vision and strategy.

This book will attempt to take the reader through the construct of this new innovative revolution, particularly in Dubai, and provide a bird's-eye view of how it came about. Most notably, the discussion will walk the reader through key milestones instrumental to Dubai's success—such as the present and past leadership, culture, strategy, and strategic vision. In addition, the discussion will present an industry agnostic, agile and progressive approach to building and leading successful innovation teams through to a successful project out-come and the attributes of good innovation leadership.

Chapter 1

The Pearl of the Arab World: Inspiring a Culture of Transformational and Sustainable Innovation

The best way to predict your future is to create it.

Abraham Lincoln

Innovation is the key that unlocks the future’s potential!

Dr. Aaron “Sandy” Amacher

Introduction

For the last three centuries, mankind has been moving at an unprecedented pace in creating the world of the future. Many would agree that this unprecedented rate of change was initiated by the innovation of a simple device called the Gutenberg press. For the first time, this simple device allowed mankind to register, share, and communalize tacit and explicit knowledge while igniting the generation of new knowledge over a wide spectrum of the world’s population. The proliferation of books, manuscripts, and other printed material became not only the nexus for sharing and learning at its origin but also for the sharing of knowledge beyond the geographical boundaries that separated diverse populations, cultures, and nations. The introduction of this simple but revolutionary innovation and change in technology also ushered in a new era of learning in which an increasing number of inquisitive minds across the world’s populations would not only share their creative ideas but also, more importantly, build on the innovations and creations created by others. This allowed for the breaking of existing paradigms in the movement out of millenniums of imagination and innovation stagnation. In his book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1962), Thomas Kuhn introduced the term paradigm shift. Kuhn’s premise was that paradigms act as patterns, which we use to control the way we view the world and new information coming in. In effect, paradigms create a box in which we are comfortable in thinking, acting, and controlling. However, there is a downside to paradigms in that they also restrict our ability to see new and innovative ways that can improve our lives and change the future. Joel Barker elaborated on Kuhn’s work in his 1989 video The Business of Paradigms. Barker demonstrated one of Kuhn’s examples of how paradigms can physically prevent people seeing new information or innovative ways. He did this by using a simple deck of cards and rapidly showing a series of seven cards to groups of individuals. However, within the set of cards, which contained the normal red diamonds, red hearts, black spades, and black clubs, a few of the cards were changed so that there were red spades and red clubs along with black diamonds and black hearts. As the audience viewed the cards flashed rapidly before their eyes, they were aptly able to discern the legitimate cards (i.e., red hearts and diamonds, black spades and clubs) very rapidly, but those cards that did not match their paradigm of what a normal card deck should look like (i.e., black diamonds and hearts and red clubs and spades) were not readily identifiable by the individuals. These people physically could not see those cards because they didn’t match the paradigm that they had in their head. Barker’s comment was that in some cases, as Kuhn stated, paradigms block new information and innovation from taking place.

The Gutenberg press and the knowledge transfer that it affected acted as the major catalyst for pushing the world into breaking the agrarian paradigm that has persisted for millenniums. It provided a course for evolutionary decision paradigms, which created revolutions in thinking and inventions and the future changing of decision paradigms key to innovation. Decision-making paradigms have evolved in much the same manner as mankind has evolved. For most of mankind’s history, the decision-making paradigm was based on an agrarian society that traditionally based its decisions on nature. Emblematic of the agricultural age, planting and harvesting were based on the seasons and the weather; most of people’s life’s decisions were based on what was happening around them on a day-to-day, season-to-season basis. The fundamental ingredient was that man or the beast of burden was the source of work.

The advent of the Industrial Revolution and the building and introduction of complex and modern machinery required a new way of making decisions. The decision-making paradigm changed as new innovations in the form of machines were introduced to replace traditional roles previously performed by humans. This machine or mechanical decision paradigm primarily dealt with the process or the replacement of the human by the machine as the source of work. But work was defined as the transformation of matter from one form to another, or the transformation of matter and energy, or the transformation of energy into one form or another. In other words, work was conceived in physical terms and, therefore, mechanization was about the use of machines to create the energy to perform physical work. Commonly referred to as the Industrial Revolution, the resulting innovative developments, such as the harnessing of steam power, offered an enticing new frontier for many developing nations. Europe and the Americas grasped the opportunity and saw a vast migration of their population from farms to urban areas to populate the factories necessary to implement the innovations of this Industrial Revolution.

As the machine-age society became more sophisticated and machines became more complex, along with the emergence of the need to integrate multiple sets of machines and humans, we gradually started to move from “machine thinking” to “systems.” However, the machine decision paradigm failed to provide the necessary methodology to meet new “systems” requirements. The underlying basis for the innovation of systems thinking was totally changing the point of view to one according to which everything belongs to something greater; all elements are part of a larger whole. The result of this type of systems paradigm thinking was the true massing of industrial power in nations such as the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and Korea in the fields of electronics, shipbuilding, automotive and major manufacturing, and the production of a plethora of consumer products. The result is that the system is an indivisible whole, and it is in the difference between an indivisible part and an indivisible whole that the root of the so-called intellectual revolution, based on the information-age decision paradigm, lies.

The first essential difference is the conversion of our preoccupation with parts of which things are made, into the preoccupation with the whole and with the wholes of which they are part. This is moving us into information-age thinking and the information-age decision-making paradigm, which can be called synthesis. We are currently in the process of again shifting into an even more advanced decision-making paradigm, which is mental manipulation, because mental work is a manipulation of symbols, whereas physical work is a manipulation of matter. Therefore, what we have now consists of the mechanization of mental work, which we have come to call automation or the information-technology age. In what is yet another revolution, the information-technology age is fundamentally different from the one that preceded it. It is not merely an extension of it, because it is the mechanization of something entirely different: the mind and how the mind functions. It mechanizes what man does with his head, rather than what he does with his body, and can do it at incredible speeds with incredible accuracy.

We are starting to see a world where very large parts of everyday life and operations will be controlled by computers and the manipulation of the data to provide enterprises with their required goods and services and the ability to conduct enterprise operations. We are seeing innovations in this decision paradigm that allow computers to directly conduct business one with another, thereby removing mankind from the interface. These current innovations in the decision paradigm have found a center of gravity within the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and especially in Dubai. Here, we truly see Dubai becoming the modern epicenter of the innovation revolution.

Background

Dubai is one of seven emirates (the others being Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah) that make up the UAE. The acknowledged epicenter of wealth and innovation in the UAE, Dubai is strategically located between the East and West. This favorable geographic position has furnished a panegyric stage and iconic showcase for the enterprising visions by the vice president, prime minister, and ruler of Dubai, His Royal Highness (HRH) Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (2016). Leveraging the pioneering vision of his father, Sheikh Rashid, Sheikh Mohammed envisioned what can best be described as a “develop for survival” approach to supplant the country’s reliance on oil revenues, which are estimated to drop significantly over the next 10–30 years. Prior to oil, the central products sold in the ports of Dubai were pearls, gold, and oriental carpets. Central to Sheikh Mohammed’s strategic vision (or the “vision of Dubai”) is for Dubai to nucleate into the international community’s leading financial-services provider, the world’s largest international transportation and redistribution hub, and, ultimately, the globe’s top medical tourism destination spot.

Dubai has registered many innovation successes to date in pursuit of its ultimate ambition to become the most innovative city since the documented innovative solutions introduced by ancient Rome. One notable but until recently overlooked innovation made by Rome in its early effort to expand its empire was the adjustment to the diverse geographical environments it was trying to influence. As anyone familiar with the challenges of living in an arid and generally desiccate climate will attest, foliage is a welcome site for sore eyes. In an effort to protect the growing communities on the peripheral boundaries of the city from the drifting sand dunes of the Arab Al Khali (Arabian desert), Dubai has developed forest belts made up of eucalyptus trees imported from Australia. Since its precipitation occurs generally in December and January each year, an innovative underground watering system was engineered to sustain the forest belts. In a nation where oil is cheaper than clean, consumable water, Dubai, like its Emirati partners and neighbors (i.e., Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Yemen) on the Arabian Peninsula, face a different set of challenges, which they are navigating with incremental success.

While typical Americans and the Western world recognize Sunday as the day of rest, in the Middle East, it is Friday. Thanks to the exemption from duties, commodities such as gold and jewelry are much cheaper than what one would find in the United States or Europe. Alcohol, although shunned in most of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, can be acquired, but it is expensive and requires significant paperwork through government channels and is not a favorite of the host nation’s culture.

When drilling for water, they found oil. One innovative idea was born when the Dubai Petroleum Company (2016) faced the daunting dilemma of where to store large quantities of oil cultivated from the shallow waters off the shore of Dubai. The solution was truly innovative and resulted in the building of large portable storage tanks that stored the harvested oil from the offshore oil fields of Fetah, Falah, and Rashid. This was truly a logistics innovation, as it allowed tankers to be filled near the source offshore, reducing time and the potential congestion common to most ports (Figure 1.1).

Inhabited some centuries before the birth of Christ, areas near the seashore were settled and small city-states were formed in the seventh and eighth centuries. Around the sixteenth century, the Portuguese attempted to occupy the area, but the Turks’ continued attacks discouraged their effort. A few centuries later, the French, British, and Dutch tried to bring the area under their control to bolster their trade with India, but the venture only bore fruit for the British East India Company, which benefitted handsomely. In 1820, Abu Dhabi (meaning “Father of the Gazelle”) came under British control, and in 1903, Dubai followed suit. In 1833, indigenous Bedouins settled in the area we now know as Dubai under the leadership of the Al Maktoum family. In the early 1950s, oil was discovered during the search for water, and the first oil fields broke ground, putting Dubai on a m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Authors
• 1 The Pearl of the Arab World: Inspiring a Culture of Transformational and Sustainable Innovation
• 2 Geopolitical Environment of Dubai and the United Arab Emirates
• 3 Dubai’s Innovation Culture and Strategy
• 4 Innovation in the Private Sector
• 5 Innovation in Government
• 6 Innovation and Leadership
• 7 Organizational Diagnostics: Through the Looking Glass
• 8 Selecting an Innovation Project: Projects That Add Lasting Value
• 9 Managing an Innovation Opportunity Project from Concept to Reality
• References
• Appendix I: Dubai Medical Tourism—A Case Study
• Appendix II: Work Environment Survey
• Index