Formation of startups and new companies
Commercial exploitation of science, technology, and novelty
System of laws, regulations, strategies, and funding priorities
Discovery and creation of new knowledge of the natural world
Application of new knowledge towards useful social ends
The last two centuries have reduced global hunger, poverty, and disease in ways that were previously unimaginable. The accelerating pace of technological development — computing, the Internet, the information and genetic engineering revolutions — only promises greater progress in coming decades.
But getting these developments to the people who need them is far from an exact science, as recent development experience has shown . For example, mechanisms for producing clean drinking water exist, but people continue to die of waterborne diseases, while millions — if not billions — go hungry, despite the fact that we have the capacity to eradicate world hunger.
On the one hand, technological innovation is a by-product of social processes; but on the other, an understanding of technology’s social dimension, and the context in which it must operate, is critical to deriving value from it.
Ideas, not ICTs
Jelel Ezzine, a cybernetics professor and director-general of international cooperation at Tunisia’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, cautions against “overestimating the role of technology as the original cause of [a] change”.
By:Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 12 July 2012
Islamic countries need to shake up their scientific establishments to commercialise technology and promote innovation, says Athar Osama.
Innovation — the process of putting scientific and technological ideas into commercial practice — is widely seen as an enabler for a new wave of economic growth in the current economic downturn.
There is a growing realisation that lack of innovation has long been a bottleneck for development. This has led to initiatives to create innovation ‘ecosystems’ that encourage scientific as well as social innovation.
In Africa, for instance, there is a concerted ef...
By:Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 18 May 2012
Building a knowledge society in the Islamic World requires structural change — not fads and symbolism, argues Athar Osama.
Last month, a special report by The Economist magazine announced the dawn of the third industrial revolution, built on the idea of individualised production powered by 3D printers and nano devices that create objects atom by atom. [1]
It talked of a not-so-distant age when the global centre of gravity of production — which in the 1970s moved to developing countries like China, Malaysia, Taiwan — will revert to the developed world, in order to be nearest to the ‘brains’....
By: Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 11 April 2012
Several Muslim countries rank among the world‘s most efficient innovators. They must build on this success, says Athar Osama.
Ever since the global business school INSEAD (Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires) started producing the Global Innovation Index reports in 2007, Islamic countries have performed rather unremarkably.
In the last three years, for instance, the top-3 performers have been the United Arab Emirates (ranked 24th for 2009-10), Qatar (24th in 2008-9) and Malaysia (31st in 2011).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the top ten among Islamic countries are predominantly oil-r...
By:Athar Osama
15 March 2012 | EN
The Muslim world and donors should use nongovernmental networks to nurture the dormant seeds of entrepreneurship, says Athar Osama.
Entrepreneurship and innovation may look like inherently Western ideas in the twenty-first century. Yet they have been part and parcel of Muslim societies even before the heyday of the earliest Islamic Empire.
Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, was long known as being on a major trade route in ancient Arabia. In later years, frontier cities of the rapidly expanding Islamic Empire became centres of commerce and learning, and it was at these meeting points of civilisations that scientific knowledge flo...
By:Athar Osama
Published on SciDev.Net on 12 October 2012
Muslim countries must alter their stance on the social sciences if they are to use technology to its full potential, says Athar Osama.
The last two centuries have reduced global hunger, poverty, and disease in ways that were previously unimaginable. The accelerating pace of technological development — computing, the Internet, the information and genetic engineering revolutions — only promises greater progress in coming decades.
But getting these developments to the people who need them is far from an exact science, as recent development experience has shown . For example, mechanisms for producing c...
By: Frank Lehner
Published in Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy on 30 August 2011.
The idea of generating solar energy on a large scale in the sun-intensive countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to satisfy their own increasing energy demand and to export surplus energy to Europe as advocated in the DESERTEC concept1 has publicly received much attention in some countries, particularly in Germany, Morocco, Tunisia, and also substantial support from their governments. Besides the DESERTEC Foundation, an industrial consortium (Dii GmbH) was founded in 2009 which consists of major European and MENA companies to push this project further b...
By: Dr. Athar Osama
Muslim-Science.Com met with Tan Sri Dr. Omar Abdur Rahman, Mahathir’s Science Advisor for over a decade and half and, the “prime mover” behind Mahathir Mohammed’s vision of a Knowledge-driven Malaysia. A deeply humble man, Tan Sri Omar insists that Mahathir was a science policymaker par excellence in his own right and that he would hardly have needed a science advisor. However, he played a critical role in providing scientific credibility to Mahathir’s plans and helping the Prime Minister reach out to the scientific community to build support for his policies.
As Malaysia’s first and longest serving Science Advisor – a position t...
