The UAE Ministry of Education commissioned SIA Partners and Innovety to design a national strategy for embedding innovation and entrepreneurship across the country’s high schools and universities.
Innovety’s role spanned the full project lifecycle — from setting the assessment framework and conducting a nationwide status-quo analysis, to benchmarking UAE performance against global leaders, identifying best practices, and developing phased roadmaps for implementation—a core example of our innovation consulting expertise.
The project’s outcome included: a unified national framework supported by a phased roadmap—positioning UAE education to foster a world-class culture of innovation and entrepreneurship
In recent years, the UAE has placed innovation at the heart of its national agenda, with the education sector playing a critical role in preparing future-ready talent.
Yet, while many schools and universities had launched initiatives in innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E), efforts were fragmented.
They lacked a unified framework, consistent benchmarks, and a clear roadmap to scale impact nationwide.
The Ministry of Education sought to understand the current state of I&E integration across its 190 public and private high schools and 50 higher education institutions, capturing insights from faculty, students, and institutional leaders.
The goal was twofold: to benchmark the UAE’s performance against global leaders such as the UK, Canada, and Singapore, and to translate these findings into a national strategy that could guide both ministry-level policy and institution-level action.
Key pain points:
Designing a national assessment framework
Innovety worked alongside SIA Partners to co-design the framework used to evaluate the integration of innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) across UAE high schools and higher education institutions.
This framework covered governance, policy alignment, curriculum integration, extracurricular activities, faculty capacity, student engagement, infrastructure, and partnerships.
Capturing a comprehensive national picture
Using this framework, the project assessed 190 public and private high schools and 50 higher education institutions through surveys, institutional self-assessments, and interviews with faculty, students, and leadership teams.
Innovety analyzed these datasets to map current I&E practices, identify capacity gaps, and highlight strengths worth scaling.
Benchmarking against global leaders
The UAE’s performance was benchmarked against high-performing education systems in the UK, Canada, and Singapore, as well as peer economies of comparable size and ambition.
Innovety synthesized best practices from these systems—from early-stage entrepreneurship programs in secondary schools to commercialization pathways in universities—to inform policy and program design.
From insights to actionable roadmaps
Findings were translated into a unified national I&E framework, accompanied by two sets of recommendations:
Innovety led the design of phased roadmaps for short-, medium-, and long-term implementation, ensuring each recommendation had clear timelines, responsible actors, and measurable indicators.
Ensuring stakeholder alignment
To secure buy-in and refine recommendations, the team held validation workshops with MoE leadership, education policymakers, institutional leaders, and private-sector partners.
These sessions ensured that the strategy was both globally informed and locally grounded, ready for adoption across the UAE’s diverse education landscape.
Partnering with Innovety was a positive success story in a strategic project in the UAE. As a team, we were able to support the integration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the national education system. The team interacted with a large number of schools and higher education institutions, benchmarked practices in leading countries, and contributed in generating impactful conclusions and recommendations to critical policies, based on a recognized national education framework driving innovation at scale.
