A note on industry's share of research

Qatar has written sustained research funding into law and plans to double research spending by 2030. That is a serious commitment, and it is unusual. A RAND Europe review published on 16 September helps show where the next constraint sits.

Two figures from it stay with me. Research and development spending is 0.68% of GDP, against an OECD average of 2.7%. And the business sector accounts for only around 13% of research, development and innovation spending.

The first number gets the headlines. The second is the one I would watch.

Why the smaller number decides more

When industry funds a small share of research, it is usually absent when the research question is chosen. That absence is invisible for years, and then it is the whole problem.

What follows is familiar to anyone who has run a technology transfer office. Universities do good science. They file patents on it. Then they go looking for a buyer. Technology transfer becomes the business of selling products nobody ordered, and the office is judged on how well it sells them.

This is not a Qatar problem. It is how most young innovation systems start, and some mature ones never leave it. But a system that is about to double its research spending is exactly the system that should ask who is at the table when the spending is allocated.

The startup side of the same country reaches the same conclusion from a different direction. The Qatar chapter of this year's Global Startup Ecosystem Report is titled Innovation's Hardest Constraint: Customers, Not Capital, and it argues that early customer access, more than funding, predicts whether a company survives and grows. Different lens, same gap. In both cases what is missing is not money. It is a buyer in the room early.

Three things that move the number

Problem statements with a budget attached. A company that co-funds the question is already halfway to being a licensee. This is the cheapest intervention available and the one most often skipped, because it requires the university to accept a question it did not choose.

Pilots treated as first contracts. An operator willing to test a result in a real setting can matter more to a spin-out than its seed round. A pilot produces the one thing a patent cannot: evidence that somebody wanted this.

Proximity. RAND points to Denmark's cluster model and to building on what already exists at Qatar Science and Technology Park and in Education City. Co-location sounds soft until you count how many partnerships began in a corridor rather than at a signing ceremony.

What this looks like from the licensing side

After years on that side of the table, my working assumption is this: the deals that close are rarely the ones with the strongest patent. They are the ones where the licensee helped shape the question.

That is the same finding as the one in my last note, arriving from the other direction. There I argued that a patent does not buy the delivery capability that decides who gets paid. Here the point is earlier and simpler. A patent bought without a buyer in the room rarely becomes a deal at all.

So the question for 2030 is not only how much is spent. It is who is present when we decide what to spend it on.

What I could not establish

Whether the 13% is rising. It is a snapshot, and I did not find a time series on the same definition that would show the direction of travel. A single figure tells you where a system is, not where it is going, and the direction is the part that matters for a 2030 target.

Comparable business-share figures for the other Gulf states on a matching definition. Without those the number is hard to read as good or bad rather than simply low against the OECD.

One request

If you lead research or strategy at a company in this region, I would value hearing one problem you would pay a university to work on. Not a partnership. A problem.

---

Sources

• RAND Europe, Positioning Qatar in the Global Research, Development, and Innovation Landscape: Comparative Insights from Small Advanced Economies, and Research, development, and innovation talent in Qatar: The policy and program landscape, both 16 September 2026.
• Startup Genome, Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2026, Qatar chapter: Innovation's Hardest Constraint: Customers, Not Capital.