Innovation as a Principle in University Governance: A Holistic Approach for Arab Universities

In recent years, higher education around Arab universities has witnessed, in many cases, a dramatic diminution in its quality of delivered product and industry-related research. This, inherently, would normally lead to degraded performance in the socio-economic ecosystem together with an associated deterioration in the economies of the countries involved. Additionally, this has had an adverse impact upon further industrial growth, which, in turn, caused stagnation and/or downturns of the economies of the constituent countries. Furthermore, the competitiveness of Arab economies has hit a brick wall due to the speed at which Western and South-East Asian industrial economies have grown. This has worsened the prevailing economic situation in many Arab countries even further and to catch up with the industrial sphere is a matter that has become something of the impossible! Smaller economies around the world have traditionally grown and prospered (emerged) as they leveraged certain niches that would put them on the map of integration with other world economies and survived mainly by making significant exports where the trade balance would stand in their favour. As the higher-education sector in the Arab world never exhibited any witnessed integration with the local industries of these countries, and where real (heavyweight) industries never emerged, a situation has arisen where real industrial competitiveness of the Arab world never surfaced. And when one would argue for the possibility of opting towards one form or another of an ICT industry, people are faced with the fact that countries that arrived to the scene much earlier, including Ireland, India, and China, compounded with the complication of an ocean of software freelancers, left the Arab world with little room for a real global industrial role. To that end, one sole approach remains to be addressed by the Arab world; one that would loosen up the grip of international economic export in the face of primary Arab industrial exports. To elicit real economic growth for Arab economies in the face of all the aforementioned, usually requires out-of-the-box approaches to help create some level of a global demand for Arab work products. Here, the way to go (and may be the only) would be to adopt innovation as a culture for a productive academic/industrial integration in these countries. This chapter will address the innovation ecosystem around the Arab world, in both industrial establishments and academic institutions and will propose one possible framework to help snatch the academic sector around the Arab world from its state of stagnation. It will also address ways of helping the industrial sector move forward and investigate effective ways to create a productive ecosystem for academic/industrial integration. This would leverage the inherent power of innovation towards creating start-ups, spinoffs, SMEs, and, therefrom, industrial establishments that the Arab world will someday pride itself with. Along the way, the chapter will address the prevailing governance structures of academic regulations to help the academic ecosystem bolster efforts in support of innovation and entrepreneurship throughout the Arab world.