Enabling growth through innovation and R&D
We take a long-term view to investment and continuously identify opportunities that complement Abu Dhabi’s innovation agenda and solidify its wider ambitions of enhancing R&D throughout the economy. As such, we are positioning our portfolio for the future by placing innovation and R&D at the heart of our strategy and culture. In doing so, we are driving the creation and market access of new products and services and introducing novel ways of working that enhance the competitiveness of our assets. This allows us to develop our portfolio companies into globally competitive businesses that can create value and drive sustainable growth.
Driving growth through innovation

Building a high-impact partner ecosystem
We are building an ecosystem of partners to accelerate Abu Dhabi’s innovation agenda by bringing together start-ups, scale-ups, technology corporations, regulators and universities. Our partnerships are designed to boost the commercial potential of R&D, solve real world challenges, and capture opportunities to co-create holistic solutions and initiate cross-sector collaboration. Our partners include Khalifa University, the Abu Dhabi-based internationally top-ranked research-intensive university, International Center for Biosaline Agriculture and the Department of Health Abu Dhabi, among others.

Nurturing highly skilled talent
Highly skilled talent is essential to bring to life Abu Dhabi’s vision to strengthen R&D throughout the economy. As a partner of the government, we are actively nurturing advanced skillsets among ADQ’s people and capturing fresh talent and new ways of thinking from local universities, enabled by our partnerships and joint projects with academic institutions. Our collaborations with Microsoft Business School and INSEAD, for example, are already supporting the growth and development of skilled AI talent across ADQ’s portfolio to further drive efficiencies and applications across all our sector clusters.

Funding Innovation and R&D
We recognize the fundamental importance of investing in innovation and R&D. This is reflected in our AED 100 million R&D testbed fund set aside to invest in the development and trial of promising solutions through innovative proof-of-concepts and pilots.