Jordan does not need oil… it needs to turn the mind into wealth (2)

This is why we need funding specifically for this particular stage. Not a new fund to finance more papers, but a fund that takes the idea from the prototype to testing and approval, then to pilot production and the first customer.

And the first customer can be the state itself.

If a Jordanian university or company develops a smart water meter, I do not say that the government should buy a million meters just because it is Jordanian. This is a mistake. Buy five thousand in a pilot project, and test it rigorously. If it fails, we know why and develop it. If it succeeds, we expand the experiment.

Five thousand becomes fifty thousand, and perhaps after that hundreds of thousands.

Then, when the Jordanian factory goes to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, or any other market, it will not say: I have a beautiful idea. It will say: I have a working product, and these are its results, and this is its operating record.

Here, the state did not give the factory a grant. It gave it something much more important: the first market.

As for what we should do, there is no need to scatter ourselves in hundreds of fields. We have clear priorities before our eyes: water, medical and diagnostic devices, specialized medicines, precision irrigation and agriculture, cybersecurity, Arab artificial intelligence, specialized software, power electronics, energy storage, and measurement and control devices.

We do not need to make a thousand things. It is enough for us to choose dozens of things that suit our capabilities and problems, and then try to become excellent in them.

But all this will not happen if the incentives within the university remain as they are.

If you tell the professor that his promotion and academic future depend primarily on the number of research papers he publishes, it is natural for him to publish research. It is not permissible to design the system in this way and then blame the professor for responding to it.

Patent, a product that has entered the market, a company that has emerged from the laboratory, a problem solved for a Jordanian factory, and a technology that saved a company a million dinars, should be real academic achievements and not side jobs.

I also believe that it is natural for the university to have a small share in the companies that are born from its laboratories, within a clear system that preserves the rights of the researcher, the university, and the investor. Then, if a company that emerged from the university succeeds, part of its success returns to the university to fund the next generation of ideas.

In this way, even the question we ask about unemployment changes.

Today, we graduate a student and ask: Where will he find a job?

Why not also ask: What can this graduate build?

The traditional university gives the student a certificate and sends him to the labor market. The university that Jordan needs should give him the knowledge, ability, and tools to solve a problem, make a product, and perhaps build a company that employs others.

The limitation of resources is not a sentence for Jordan to remain a small economy, but it means that the mistake with us is more expensive. We cannot waste our most important resource.

And our most important resource is not underground.

It is in the universities, in the laboratories, in the companies, and in the minds of young Jordanians.

I do not want our only success to be that we graduate an excellent engineer and then export him to build the economy of another country. I want the export of competencies to remain a natural choice for people, but I also want to export the device designed by the Jordanian engineer, the medicine developed by the Jordanian researcher, the program built by the Jordanian programmer, and the technology that emerged from a Jordanian university.

Therefore, perhaps we should reduce the question: What is there under the ground of Jordan?

And ask more: What is there inside the minds of Jordanians?

And more important than all of this: Have we built the system that can turn what is in these minds into wealth?

Because resource-limited countries do not become rich only by what they extract from their land, but by what they know how to extract from the minds of their children.