Orchestrating the Omani National Innovation Ecosystem: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

The vision of the Omani National Innovation Strategy (NIS) focuses on achieving an innovation-driven economy that would place Oman among the top 20 leading countries for innovation in the world by 2040. In this research, we consider an innovation ecosystem as a non-linear, complex adaptive network to re-act its characteristics. This proposed research explores combining complexity science and social simulation to improve and inform Omani policy-making on the effects and impacts of their policymaking on the structure, composition and outputs of innovation networks. In this research, we propose using agent-based modelling to investigate the dynamics characterizing the innovation-related policies harmonization and the role that policy intervention can have on governing the national innovation ecosystem. Specifically, we are considering and assessing the impact of two policy actions: (1) providing funding aimed at speed-moving innovations from discovery through to commercialization, and (2) increasing actors' expectations towards new technologies by means of information spreading. The application of agent-based modelling (ABM) to the field of innovation policy in the Omani innovation space, is still absent. This proposed study presents a courageous project applying the popular, agent-based simulation to study an Omani innovation policy, namely, the National Innovation Strategy.