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Ahmad Saleh, partner and head of innovation, patents and industrial property at Al Tamimi and Company, said the Kingdom’s innovation strategy has moved beyond simply adopting and manufacturing technology toward building homegrown solutions that can be protected, commercialised and turned into national economic assets. The shift reflects a broader effort to strengthen control over intellectual property creation and ownership while transforming research outputs into drivers of diversified growth. Saudi Arabia has spent the past decade constructing the institutional scaffolding needed to support this transition, Saleh noted.
The establishment of the Saudi Authority for Intellectual Property in 2018 and the Research, Development and Innovation Authority two years later provided the regulatory backbone for the new approach, according to official records. These bodies have helped align national research efforts with four priority domains identified in the National Aspirations and Priorities for Research, Development and Innovation: health and wellness, sustainable environment and essential needs, energy and industrial leadership, and economies of the future. A Research, Development and Innovation Authority assessment sets the long-term goal of lifting annual RDI investment to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2040.
General Authority for Statistics data placed Saudi research and development expenditure at 22.61 billion Saudi riyals in 2023, marking a 17.4 percent rise from the previous year and bringing the total R&D workforce to more than 49,000 people. The private sector accounted for 8.70 billion riyals of that spending while government entities and higher education institutions contributed the remainder. Such increases align with the authority’s emphasis on moving from basic research toward applied work that can be commercialised at scale.
Saleh outlined a sequential pathway that begins with higher investment and leads through homegrown innovation, intellectual property protection, commercialisation and eventual expansion into global markets. The Research, Development and Innovation Authority has produced multiple studies showing that successful commercialisation of research outputs could generate 2.25 riyals of wider economic activity for every riyal invested. These projections underpin efforts to create thousands of specialised jobs and reduce reliance on hydrocarbon revenues.
Recent corporate moves illustrate the momentum. Nokia opened an artificial intelligence-focused research and development centre in Riyadh this month to develop network automation software, with plans to generate technologies that can be exported from the Kingdom. Separately, the national biotechnology strategy aims to add 34.6 billion dollars to non-oil gross domestic product by 2040 while creating 11,000 specialised jobs by 2030, according to health sector officials. Both initiatives feed into the Research, Development and Innovation Authority’s priority areas.
The authority’s reports emphasise the need for stronger academic-corporate partnerships to accelerate technology transfer from laboratories to markets. Analyses indicate Saudi Arabia already produces patent volumes comparable to median OECD countries within its chosen priority fields. Continued progress on these fronts is expected to position the Kingdom as a more significant player in global knowledge-based industries.
