In Brainstorming the Gulf: Innovation and the Knowledge Economy in the GCC, the report's author, Peter Engelke, Senior Fellow for the Strategic Foresight Initiative in the Atlantic Council's Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, highlights the successes that Gulf states have enjoyed to date and addresses the major hurdles to sustaining and expanding these successes. While all signs point to the staying power of Arab Gulf leadership's long-term commitment to the knowledge economy, the harder part will be sustaining the knowledge economy's soft infrastructure—the dimension of entrepreneurial culture involving creativity, expression, inclusion, disruption, and borrowing from global cultural flows. If talented people are at the core of the innovation process, government policy in the Gulf ought to focus as much on the creation of dynamic and livable places in order to attract and retain the best talent from all over the world.
