How the UAE’s innovation culture moves from global to local, and then back again

Edition #127 GovMesh Digest: The UAE’s Mohammed Bin Rashid Center for Government Innovation talks about their decade-long journey to build a government that says “it’s possible”…

When Abeer Tahlak and Noora Almahri present at GovMesh, they do so to participants from across Europe and Asia – countries as geographically distant as Taiwan and Italy, as different in size as Lithuania and India. But they begin with a recognition that “we share the same reality” and “go through the same challenges” as teams trying to reimagine how bureaucracy functions.

Chief among these challenges - say the team from the UAE - is a government that says “that’s not possible”, one stuck in its ways and that blocks innovation from a policy or delivery perspective.

In a UAE context, continues Tahlak, the stakes are too high not to get this right. “Innovation is not a kind of side initiative”, she says, it is a “national identity and leadership takes it super seriously”.

Tahlak and Almahri’s team at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Center for Government Innovation are principal among those responsible for fostering this innovation culture in the UAE.

Tahlak and Almahri were participants of GovMesh 2.0 (front, center)

Their team is 10 years old, and Tahlak describes their work over the last decade as “dismantling all those not possible, impossible assumptions” – from placing Chief Innovation Officers in every federal entity to supporting departments to spend 1% of the UAE’s national budget on fostering innovation.

Creating the beginnings of an innovation-first culture

For more than a year now, the UAE has been operating a Zero Bureaucracy program – an ambitious effort to eliminate all unnecessary government process as part of an attempt to imagine the UAE government as a “sandbox for the future”.

It is an initiative taken seriously by the top levels of government – after its first year, both the highest and lowest performing entities were publicly named.

But it is also part of a broader culture shift. The UAE created a Ministry of Possibilities in 2019 to address systematic challenges in government through design thinking and experimentation. The Center itself has a dedicated team to scout and detect early-stage innovations elsewhere in the world.

The UAE created a Ministry of Possibilities in 2019 to help drive an innovation culture (Source)

“Our role is to counter those that say ‘it’s impossible’ and say not only is it possible, but it has been done before”, Tahlak says.

This is not always easy. Tahlak and Alhmahri talk about the dangers of “novelty fatigue” – where constant new launches, new ideas, and big announcements sap energy within a civil service.

In the contexts of the UAE’s public announcements around which agencies are the best innovators, there’s also a risk of unhealthy competition between government bodies – “when you’re in competition you want to win, you want to pitch the next big thing, you want to show impact”.

To mitigate these risks, say the Mohammed Bin Rashid Center team, it is important to recognize the many component parts of an innovation culture: a mindset shift, changes in structures, and strong innovation talent in government.

“It took us 10 years to have this conversation in a mature way, and to know how to speak to each other about innovation”.

From global to local, and local to global

Crucial now for the Mohammed Bin Rashid Center’s team is scaling this innovation culture. Partly, this will be achieved by working with local and international partners to answer bold questions. Tahlak gives one collaboration with a Spanish design studio to answer the question, “can people with Alzheimer’s and dementia help to write the history of the UAE?”.

The Spanish startup has developed a methodology called “synthetic memories”, which uses Generative AI to help people visually reconstruct their personal memories. The Center honed in on this example at the World Government Summit, giving people in the Emirati government a chance to engage with the people behind the case study.

Beyond surfacing these examples, there is work to be done in adapting many of these solutions to a UAE context. “One of the challenges we face”, says Tahlak, “is that off-the-shelf commercial LLMs struggled with the UAE context, because they are trained on language and images from the Global North”.

It is a familiar challenge for governments and private users of AI around the world. “They struggle to understand our landscape, our clothes, our cultural references” she continues.

In the context of synthetic memories, the Center has had “to reach out to archives and independent photographers, engaging with them and creating partnerships for them to donate their images to this project”.

Just as a shiny frontend of a product may hide a complex backend, so too does the final use case of synthetic memories require a huge amount of work to set it up for success. In reaching out to these archivists, the team discovered “an even deeper challenge, how scarce archival footage is in our region”.

In the end, to recreate the “synthetic memories” project in the UAE, “we also had to redesign clinical and interview protocols with our team at the hospital to fit our health authorities, rules and procedures”, as well as accounting for ethical and cultural sensitivities.

Scaling any innovative project then, and by extension a culture of innovation, is really “an intensive back and forth conversation”.

It is clear that the Center’s team has learnt how to localize innovation – through process changes, mindset shifts, and adapting products – through a decade of iteration. They are now ready to share this roadmap with the world.

“Imagine a government that works with the agility of a startup, the foresight of think tanks, and has the inclusiveness of a community-driven initiative”, Tahlak says.

That’s the vision of the UAE. Just as the countries in the room at GovMesh were facing common challenges, the UAE’s hope is that together they can find common solutions too.