University-Industry Cooperation and Conditions for Start-Ups

After decades of relying on oil to generate economic growth, Saudi Arabia is pursuing a new, knowledge-based development strategy. Beyond simply increasing investment in education, a key component of the new strategy is to foster the entrepreneurial activities of scientists in order to create economic growth and enhance international competitiveness. This chapter seeks to analyse and identify the specific conditions in Saudi Arabia that either promote or inhibit scientist entrepreneurship. Future work on the subject will be merited to study actual start-up behaviour and determinants of success or failure. Also, the somewhat unexpected findings on female entrepreneurship call for a good deal more investigation, including how and why nascent female entrepreneurs decide to start companies and, more importantly, what start-up method they choose. For instance, do females use proxy start-ups, such as family networks, or openly start a company by themselves? Another study limitation is the lack of a codified human capital stock in Saudi Arabia (and in the Middle East in general), which indicates that future research may need to identify proper proxy variables to quantify human capital.