INVENTIONS AND PATENTS IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYTICAL STUDY FROM DOCUMENTATION AND PROTECTION TO LAUNCHING AND PRODUCTION

Abstract

April 2016 is one of the most glorious and historical dates for the KSA future when His Royal Highness Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud presented the Saudi Vision 2030, a fulfillment of the directives of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to set strategic goals that express the Saudis ambition and reflect their capabilities and talents. This young and ambitious vision began with HRH Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s message: “Together, we will continue building a better country, fulfilling our dream of prosperity and unlocking the talent, potential, and dedication of our young men and women.” Therefore, many achievements have been made based on the Saudi Vision 2030. Several transformational enablers have crystallized during the past five years, contributing to tangible results in the government work system, the economy, and society and building the success foundations for the future. However, KSA has faced many challenges and got many experiences that have strengthened people’s confidence in achieving their goals. That’s why KSA’s 2030 vision has worked to increase government effectiveness and responsiveness by investing in government digital transformation. KSA’s vision also has created opportunities for growth and investment, several new economic sectors, opened our doors to the world, raised the standard of government, and grand the citizen’s life high quality. In fact, all these achievements were made by the hands of the sons and daughters of our great country with the supervision and support of our great leaders. Moreover, based on the latest Saudi Census, by the General Authority for Statistics, the percentage of youth aged from 15 to 35 years represents two-thirds of the society in KSA, equivalent to 67% of the total population. Therefore, giving all the support needed to these young Saudi minds will lead our country to varied areas of new inventions in light of the 2030 vision. Furthermore, GII stated that KSA ranks 66th among the 131 economists featured in 2020. In 2022, KSA made great strides until it reached 51st globally for GII classification. This leads us to acknowledge that vision 2030 has significantly impacted this innovative movement at all focused levels and aspects. However, despite all tremendous touchable support, the Saudi inventor is still facing some obstacles and needs cooperative measured assistance, whether on the financial, moral, educational, legislative, procedural, technical, marketing, or other logistical requests, which, if planned to be provided smoothly, correctly, and at the right time, we will discover some other undiscovered great minds that will make the name of KSA shinier and among the top 10 countries that export inventions to the world. In addition to that, one of the most superior outcomes of the Saudi 2030 Vision is the establishment of SAIP in 2017 and the NIPST launch in 2022-2023. After that, significant IP fields revived and are strong recently, such as Trademarks and Copyrights, but the focus on patents, inventions, and inventors is still below average. Although KACST and Mawhiba are doing great in their powers and scopes, much work must be done to cover more missing parts in other related fields. In terms of society, KSA has great youth energies and intelligent minds. Many Saudis have studied and learned in the best local or even global universities; many young Saudis are fluent in more than one international language. Also, many of them are open to the other world scientifically and socially, and most are using technologies daily. All these ingredients and more give any interested party the green light to focus on such a project for the KSA’s future in creating a stable environment for inventors and patents holders and supporting it economically, socially, and politically to make KSA among the top countries in the field of inventions, advanced technologies, AI, and IP as well. Frankly, patents as legal protection certificates in KSA enjoy enough support from SAIP, but in terms of final products that can be compelling, it needs many efforts to reach the approbate satisfaction. On the other hand, as a society, we lack continuous awareness of the importance of inventions and their patent protection. We must seek, with ambition, to see the outputs of these Saudi patents on the ground and benefit from them locally and globally. Even in terms of education, academic, and research publications, much work must be done to enrich Saudi libraries with the latest specialized valuable references. Finally, KSA was and still cares about its people, citizens, and residents in all aspects of life, according to Shari'ah. Vision 2030 seeks to make the world see us from different perspectives, seeking to visit us, invest with us, and perhaps live in our country. As Saudis, this inspiring vision gave us a different perspective to see things in a way that has a lot of passion, challenge, steadfastness, and achieving goals, no matter how difficult they are. Therefore, this dissertation contributed primarily to 1) Describing and analyzing the current situation of many aspects related to the inventions, the inventors in KSA, and the mechanism of protecting the inventions through patents as a part of the IP system. 2) IP protection in Islam as an educational knowledge, and the KSA legal environment before and after the Saudi Vision 2030. 3) Highlighting Islamic inventions and Muslim inventors in the forgotten golden ages. 4) A complete updated overview and achievements of the Saudi Vision 2030. 5) An inclusive detailed legal overview of patents in KSA. As a result, the study concluded, after a comprehensive theoretical and legal description based on the available collected data and other information, to adopt two approaches regarding the development methods for inventions and patents in KSA, one of which deals with the actual situation in the present from three main proposed aspects which are the ecosystem aspects, the legal and procedural aspects, and the logistical aspects in all its interrelated elements. The other one is the future which looks forward to race beside time to reach the impossible through a general proposed map to describe a comprehensive development method that will fulfill what Saudis have already done in making dreams catchable.