Doha - The Gulf Organization for Industrial Consulting (Goic) has partnered with US-based Global Emerging Technology Institute (Geti) to develop the Knowledge Based Industries (KBI) Road Map for the GCC as a whole and individual member countries.
The main goal was to advise GCC member states on how to build a high-value infrastructure for KBI which would include emerging technology development and how they could be adapted to enhance the competitiveness and the growth of the existing industrial sectors, Geti Director, Louis Ross told The Peninsula yesterday.
He said that the Road Map was also intended to identify niche areas in which the region could specialise if it decided to invest public and private investment into these emerging technologies and into building the infrastructure.
Ross is in Qatar after finishing the second leg of a fact-finding mission that covered GCC member countries.
"We have first learned about the industrial structure and then we learned about what is here in terms of human resources and infrastructure related to knowledge-based industries," said Ross.
He said that the collected data was being assessed and would help in developing the recommendations.
The draft of the Road Map is being put together with GOIC and a workshop is scheduled for mid-January next year to introduced it and receive comments from organisations that have been interviewed during the fact-finding mission. The final KBI Road Map is scheduled for April.
"One of the goals is to try to develop a dependence on the region as opposed to outside the region in terms of having their own intellectual property for these emerging technologies, developing research parks, attracting large multinational corporations to invest in the region," said Ross.
"The region needs also to attract intellectual property and skilled workers, who can act as advisors to build domestically a good, strong base of GCC skilled national workers," he said.
As for the technology gap between upstream and downstream in oil and gas industry, he said there was lack of centralised Research and Development (R&D) public funding from the GCC and individual countries.
He said that there was a strong incentive now for them to use a road map like the one Goic and Geti were working on to decide to put a certain percentage of money into R&D that would help to develop the downstream sectors and thus attracting private sector investment not only in the region but also from outside the region.
Ahmed Hassan Dhaif, Assistant Secretary General at Goic said that the region let pass the IT industry because it was unprepared for lack of appropriate education system and facilities to build an IT industry.
"We don't want to miss this KBI wave and Goic's initiative is intended to catch the wave from the beginning", he said.
"The region has what is needed to catch the wave; liquidity, political will to reform the industrial sector and all GCC governments are also in an era of reforming their educational system. It is the right time for such an initiative."
By Nasser Al Harthy
© The Peninsula 2006
