Qatar 3rd fastest rising country in the Global Innovation Index 2022

Qatar is the third fastest rising country in innovation in the Global Innovation Index of 2022, highlighted a top official Tuesday.
“Qatar has gone up several places in the global innovation Index and currently is the third fastest rising country in the global Innovation Index of 2022,” said Omar Ali al-Ansari, secretary general of the QRDI Council. He was speaking to the media on the sidelines of the launch of Qatar-Spain Innovation Programme (QASIP).
“This is because Qatar has a lot of the ingredients in place to promote innovation. QRDI provides the strategy and various other supporting agencies play an important role. Agencies such as Qatar Development Bank, Investment Promotion Agency, QSTP, Freezones and the strong academic research institutes play an important role resulting in Qatar becoming a fast rising nation in innovation in the global innovation index,” explained al-Ansari.
The official also highlighted that this was the first bilateral innovation programme in Qatar. “It is one of a kind of collaboration and it is the first time such a vehicle is used to incentivise the private sector capability and talent in Qatar,” he continued.
“QASIP comes in line with the two Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by Qatar with Spain last year. The MoUs were signed with the Ministry of Innovation and Science as well as with the Centre of Technology Development and Innovation, Spain. We worked with them to translate these programmes into practical programmes as Qatar Spain Innovation programme” pointed out al-Ansari.
He stated that the whole point of the bilateral innovation programme is to join the Qatari companies with Spanish companies in the field of innovation to address some of the common challenges of both the countries and shared interest to solve these challenges.
“We are doing it by enabling the innovation in the private sector from both the sides to become the spearheads of these programme. We are putting the private sector at the forefront and supporting and incentivising them, pool the resources together and solve the common challenges,” he noted.
“We have various challenges where innovation play a major role. It could be food security, water security, precision medicine, energy efficiency among others. So we have a lot of common issues and we will try to solve them through innovation. We are aligning together on the challenges common to both the countries. The private sector can leverage the infrastructure from the academic institutions by making use of their talents and labs or other facilities,” added al-Ansari.