Few will fail to be inspired by our story yesterday on Emirati inventor Ahmed Al Mazroei. The Abu Dhabi-based 34-year-old was awarded the Entrepreneurial Personality of the Year for his work on robot camel jockeys and falcon training creations.
The ability to innovate and, crucially, turn inventions into marketable products is essential to building a genuinely entrepreneurial culture. The question, then, is how to create an environment that allows many others to follow Mr Al Mazroei’s example.
That starts with both education and inspiration. Education, of course, is essential to providing young people with the right intellectual tools. But inspiration is equally important.
Young people need to hear from inventors and entrepreneurs, to understand how they think and how they got their start. They need to be inspired – and a crucial part of inspiration is seeing someone working for themselves and being publicly rewarded for it.
The second step is getting the legal and financial framework right, which requires government involvement.
There is still too much red tape to be cut through to establish a business. The licensing system remains too complex. The laws on bankruptcy, as this newspaper has argued several times before, need to be reformed.
Establishing the right financial support system is also essential. Through organisations like the Khalifa Fund, small and medium businesses can get money. But banks, too, must be more willing to offer funds and support to small start-ups.
The third step is to create a city- and countrywide support network. At its smallest, this would be networks of entrepreneurs to support each other. But government needs a longer term plan, one that links schools and universities with researchers and businesses, so that they can feed into each other. Researchers with good ideas can easily find a home in businesses, and businesses need talented graduates.
Entrepreneurship requires an entire framework to work. As with one of Mr Al Mazroei’s inventions, when all parts of the machine work together, then the final product appears effortless.
