Promoting Technology and Innovation : Recommendations to Improve Arab ICT Competitiveness

GEOFFREY SAMUELS, INSEAD The Middle East has begun to embrace the Internet. During the past six years, the region recorded the largest growth in Internet users among the major world areas as the number of Middle Eastern citizens accessing the Web soared by more than 600 percent, three times the world’s average increase.The mobile telephone market has become a prodigy market, as liberalization across the region has led multiple vendors competing to lower costs and improve performance to attract record numbers of new customers. However, more important than rising Internet access or ringing mobile telephones is official awareness at the highest levels of Middle Eastern governments that it is no longer possible to relegate information and communication technology (ICT) policies to an administrative sideshow.A country’s ICT capabilities can profoundly affect its capacity to innovate and its global competitiveness, as well as improve the socioeconomic prospects of its less-advantaged citizens. Senior-level attention to ICT as a key enabler of innovation has been expressed in different ways in different countries, but a fundamental and salutary change is that these issues now rank as top agenda items.Whether this attention will usher in effective policies, however, remains a debatable issue.