Paved with good inventions
By Khaled Diab
The
bumpy road to innovation in the Arab world is paved with good inventions which
never see the light of day.
July 2008
Have you heard of the Egyptian Electric Pedal?
No, it is not some New Ageist exercise bike
that charges your aura, enhances your spiritual well-being, gives you access to
the most exclusive esoteric knowledge and cures all known conditions.
It is, in fact, an innovation of powerful
simplicity designed to deal with the forthcoming energy crunch and reduce urban
pollution. The EEP, which is buried under busy roads, acts like a giant dynamo,
turning roads into powerhouses. The technology utilises the normally wasted
kinetic energy of cars and converts it into electricity.
The Think
Tank Team (3T), the creators of the pedal, estimate that installing the
technology on a busy 100-km stretch of road would generate enough energy to
supply around 5,000 households and create 250 jobs.
If applied widely enough, this low-tech green
solution has the potential of not only generating electricity that is up to 70%
cheaper but also of slashing energy consumption. The developers reckon that, if
Egypt installed 30,000 such pedals, it could knock 20% off the country’s oil
consumption, saving hundreds of millions of dollars a year and creating up to
half a million jobs.
Even if the real potential of this inexpensive
technology is less than the developers believe, it is still a very promising
concept. So, what has been the fate of this bright idea?
Since 2004, the EEP has been powering the Cairo
headquarters of Petrojet, an Egyptian oil company.
Ministers expressed some initial enthusiasm when the concept was launched at
the Arab Ideas Market. However, the government, from the Ministry of
Electricity to the Social Fund for Development, has adopted a “wait and see”
approach.
“Our major constraint was, and remains, the
attitude of the community as a whole, and decision-makers in particular,
towards the project,” complained 3T’s director Ihab Abdel-Karim in an interview. “Nobody has
been prepared to provide the least support to allow the initiative to see the
light.”
Tired of waiting for the authorities and local
market to take up their idea and run with it, 3T has decided, despite its
expressed preference for keeping the “Egypt” in the EEP, to seek foreign
partners.
There is no real shortage of bright minds and
innovators, as my mother, who occasionally takes up the cause of one or the
other in her idealistic attempts to improve the world, never tires of telling
me. In fact, given the Arab world’s shoddy R&D record, the science pages of
newspapers and the shelves of university libraries are surprisingly full of
clever innovations and ideas that rarely make it beyond the drawing board.
However, the dominant patronage culture in
academia, the shortage of research funding, the almost complete absence of
private research, the difficulty of registering and protecting intellectual
property, as well as the rote-based education system, may explain why more
research is carried out by Arabs outside the region than inside it.
The UN’s shocking 2002 Arab Human
Development Report stated that Arab countries only invested 0.4% of their
collective GDP in R&D. That said, the Arab world
is way ahead of China and India in its per-capita output of science papers.
Summing up the bleak picture, former Jordanian
Prime Minister Adnan Badran
told
the World Science Forum in Budapest last November: “The combined sum of Arab
expenditure on R&D, education and health is less than Arab military
expenditure.”
Nevertheless, things are slowly improving. For
instance, Egyptian expenditure on R&D increased from 0.3% of GDP in the
1990s to almost 1% in 2006/2007. This still falls far short of the regional
knowledge powerhouse, Israel, which, according to UNESCO,
sets aside nearly 5% of its national income to fund research, one of the
highest figures in the world.
During a recent visit to Jordan, I saw some
promising signs of hope. The Jordanian government has set up some half a dozen
technology incubators, some in collaboration with the EU, in the past few years.
Recognising that too much research winds up collecting dust in the Arab world,
one successful approach has been to raid the archives for bright ideas that
have promising application potential.
MonoJo
is one company that was born out of this process. The firm has developed local
varieties of monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies which can be used for
clinical and research purposes to diagnose diseases.
I visited the oldest of these incubators, iPark, where young
Jordanian innovators are given seed funding and a location to let their
imagination loose. Companies incubated there include IT developers, chip
designers and game makers.
Kindisoft
has been one of the park’s biggest successes. This start-up has developed an award-winning solution that
protects the hard-earned intellectual property of Flash developers.
“At first, Flash was not seen as a serious
development platform,” explains Ammar Mardawi, the firm’s founder. “Now that it is, we have a lot
of business.”
In fact, Mardawi and
co showed remarkable foresight, since millions of web users now have Flash
media installed on their machines. This has made Flash
an attractive platform for developers, which has, in turn, lured the “reverse
engineers” who have, according to one estimate, stolen code from 2 million
Flash applications since 1998.
Incubators like iPark
suffer from their own peculiar financial challenges. “Most venture capitalists
in the Middle East are not interested in the small amounts our start-ups need.
It is relatively easy to get your hands on $10m, but it can be hard to acquire
a few thousand,” Omar Hamarneh, iParks
director, told me.
This also touches on another major challenge
facing the Arab world. Countries that have the human resources lack the funds,
and countries that have the finances tend to lack the people. In theory, this
sounds like a match made in heaven, but a lot of political, cultural and
bureaucratic barriers stand in the way of efficiently matching brains with money
regionally.
There are a number of efforts in motion that
seek to promote pan-regional, collaborative R&D, including the independent Arab Science and Technology Foundation which
seeks to create “simple solutions to common Arab problems”, including water
desalination and solar power. To overcome fragmentation, it might not be a bad
idea for Arab countries to take such small-scale models further, and
co-ordinate their scientific efforts more closely.
The Arab world needs to shift away from being
largely an importer of science and technology and create and apply knowledge
that addresses the specific challenges facing the region. Some progress has
been made, but more needs to be done to reform education systems, and create a
culture and system that appreciates and rewards innovation.
This column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section on 25
June 2008. Read the related
discussion.
ã2008 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the
copyright of Khaled Diab.