economy.
With the demographic time bomb ticking, the gulf’s oil-rich governments have also tried to build academic research clusters. Every technology cluster has a collection of great educational institutions. Silicon Valley famously got its start in 1939 when William Hewlett and David Packard, two Stanford University engineering graduates, pooled their funds of $538 and founded Hewlett-Packard. Their mentor was a former Stanford professor, and they set up shop in a garage in nearby Palo Alto.
But the Arab world’s cultural and social institutions, as was reported by a U.N.-sanctioned committee of Arab intellectuals, are chronically underdeveloped. The United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, which presented the organization’s research from 2002 through 2005, found that the number of books translated annually into Arabic in all Arab countries combined was one-fifth the number translated into Greek in Greece. The number of patents registered between 1980 and 2000 from Saudi Arabia was 171; from Egypt, 77; from Kuwait, 52; from the United Arab Emirates, 32; from Syria, 20; and from Jordan, 15—compared with 7,652 from Israel. The Arab world has the highest illiteracy rates globally and one of the lowest numbers of active research scientists with frequently cited articles. In 2003, China published a list of the five hundred best universities in the world; it did not include a single mention of the more than two hundred universities in the Arab world.14
Recognizing the importance of universities for R&D, which is necessary for patents and innovation, Saudi Arabia is opening the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, to create a research home for twenty thousand faculty and staff members and students. It will be the first university in Saudi Arabia to have male and female students in the same classes. Qatar and the UAE have established partnerships with iconic Western academic institutions. Qatar’s Education City houses satellite campuses for Weill Cornell Medical College, Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science and business administration programs, a Georgetown University international relations program, and a Northwestern University journalism program. Abu Dhabi— one of the seven emirates in the UAE—has established a satellite campus for New York University. The idea is that if Arab countries can attract the most innovative researchers from around the world, it will help stimulate an innovation culture locally.
But these new institutions have not made much progress. They cannot recruit a reliable stable of foreign academic talent to lay roots and make a long-term commitment to the Arab world. “It has been more about bringing education brands to the gulf than immigrating and assimilating brains,” Chris Davidson told us. “These universities are focused on national reputation building, not real innovation.”15
Israel’s case was different. Top-notch universities were founded well before there even was a state. Professor Chaim Weizmann, a world-renowned chemist who helped launch the field of biotechnology with his invention of a novel method of producing acetone, commented on this oddity at the inauguration of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on July 24, 1918: “It seems at first sight paradoxical that in a land with so sparse a population, in a land where everything still remains to be done, in a land crying out for such simple things as ploughs, roads, and harbours, we should begin by creating a centre of spiritual and intellectual development.”16
The Hebrew University’s first board of governors included Weizmann, Israel’s first president, as well as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Buber. The Technion was founded in 1925. The Weizmann Institute of Science followed in 1934 and, in 1956, Tel Aviv University—the largest university in Israel today. Thus by the late 1950s, Israel’s population was only around the two million mark and the country already had the seeds of four world-class universities. Other major universities, such as Bar-Ilan University, University of Haifa, and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, were founded in 1955, 1963, and 1969, respectively.
Today, Israel has eight universities and twenty-seven colleges. Four of them are in the top 150 worldwide universities and seven are in the top 100 Asia Pacific universities. None of them are satellite campuses from abroad. Israeli research institutions were also the first in the world to commercialize academic discoveries.
In 1959 the Weizmann Institute established Yeda (which means “knowledge” in Hebrew) to market its research. Yeda has since spawned thousands of successful medical technology products and companies. Between 2001 and 2004, the institute amassed one billion shekels (more than $200 million) in royalty revenues. By 2006, Yeda was ranked first in income royalties among world academic institutes.17
Several years after the creation of Yeda, the Hebrew University founded its own technology transfer company, called Yissum (a word for “implementation” in Hebrew). Yissum earns over $1 billion annually in sales of Hebrew University–based research and has registered 5,500 patents and 1,600 inventions. Two-thirds of its 2007 inventions were in biotechnology, a tenth were in agricultural technology, and another tenth were in computer science and engineering products. The research has been sold to Johnson & Johnson, IBM, Intel, Nestle, Lucent Technologies, and many other multinational companies. Overall, Yissum was recently ranked twelfth—after ten American universities and one British university— in global biotech patent rankings (Tel Aviv University is
