Hello everyone and Happy New Year to you all! I am writing this not just because we have a new year but because I haven't written to you for a while. I have procrastinated over time on writing these emails as they have become very long, and honestly, they represent a lot of work: collecting information, organizing, writing, editing, and so on. Thus, I tended to postpone this activity. But I now feel it is appropriate at the start of the new year and new academic semester, to send you this letter. I hope it will not be long. If it becomes very long, I might divide it into parts, but I will try as much as possible to be concise and pithy this time.

Another thing I am trying to do is for this first part to be high-level, and to look at our overall journey, rather than be specific and zoom in on individual issues. Therefore, you will note that the progress update here uses 2019 as a reference, rather than last year. I plan later in this document, or in subsequent documents, to try to tackle specific issues.

Transformation objective: Let’s first talk at a very high level about what KFUPM wants to do as part of its transformation that started three years ago. What do we want to achieve? What does the government want us to achieve? What is the strategic objective of KFUPM? To put it simply, the strategic objective of KFUPM is to expand the Saudi and global economies. Primarily the Saudi economy, but because the Saudi economy has become so well-aligned with the global economy, the two objectives are served by the same endeavor.
 
Expanding an economy: So how do we expand an economy? How is that done in general, but specifically an economy that for a long time was a mono-sector economy (e.g. depending largely on the oil and gas sector)? One cannot expand such an economy (or for that matter, any economy) by focusing on that one large sector (already the largest sector in the world). You can only expand by adding new sectors, establishing them, and nourishing them. Hence, the objective of expanding the Saudi economy becomes that of establishing new sectors.
 
Establishing new sectors: But how do you establish new sectors? What does it take to do that? And the answer is you need two things: you need investment, and you need talent. Those outside academia usually focus a lot on investment, but, truly, you cannot establish any sector unless you have sufficient talent that is able to carry that sector: from design (and I emphasize design), to fabrication, assembly, and operation. Otherwise, that sector can never be effectively launched, and neither can it have any permanence or sustainability.
 
Add or multiply? So, we need investment, and we need talent. What is the operator between the two? Is it the plus sign, investment and talent, or is it some other operator? I contend that it is not the plus sign, for if the relationship between investment and talent were additive, you could compensate for the lack of talent by more investment, which you cannot. The relationship between them is indeed multiplicative. It is the multiplication of investment and talent that gives rise to establishing new sectors because talent amplifies, multiplies, and enables investment. Without it, if you multiply by zero you get a zero. Likewise, if you have no investment your talent would just migrate elsewhere to find greener pastures in other economies. Hence, to expand the economy you need to establish new sectors, and to establish new sectors you need talent.
 
Types of academic output: But we must ask: what talent is needed to establish new sectors? It isn't every talent, it is a certain type of talent. Let us talk a bit at a high level in a more general way about what I consider the three types of academic output or the three types of university graduates.
 
The first type is the economy-burdening output. Those are the ones who graduate from a university with skills that are not needed in today's nor tomorrow's economy. Therefore, they become a burden on the economy; they need to be reskilled; and many end up with jobs that are much lower than their capabilities. In general, the economy suffers because of them.
 
The second type is the economy-maintaining output. Those are the graduates who become bankers, engineers, physicians, etc. who operate the current economy and ensure its continuity. This is by far the largest element of any economy and it is essential for the continued operation and development of the current economy.
 
The third type is the economy-creating output. Those are the distinguished graduates (whose numbers are often small) who are going to create the new sectors, not just maintain the current economy. This is the specialty and niche of KFUPM. After all, we accept the top 0.8% of students into KFUPM, and we tell all of our students when they join – and I did that with the students that I met – “You are not here to learn to get a job, you are here to learn to create a job,” let me repeat that, Create a job! 
 
Therefore, to summarize, expanding the economy requires new sectors, new sectors require talent, but not just any talent; rather, economy-creating talent.
 
Academia and tech progress: But then how do you train this talent and how do you carry out your activities in academia and research in general? For that I believe there are three types of postures for academic institutions in general.
 
First are the tech-lagging institutions. These are usually large teaching universities which do not contribute to technology development, and, therefore, leave a lot on the table in terms of creating new research to help humanity and in terms of effectively developing their talent.
 
The second type is the tech-following institutions. These are the tag-alongs. Whenever something becomes fashionable in the industry, they gravitate towards it and use it as a new goal. So, when nanotechnology was fashionable ten years ago, everybody was doing nanotechnology, creating nanotech centers, funding nanotech research, etc. Not that nanotechnology is not useful – far from it – it is just that the industry started popularizing it, and then academic institutions jumped on the bandwagon. And now, of course, ChatGPT and Large Language Models. Although this is not bad, it does not really position these economic institutions well, because universities need to be the third type:
 
The tech-leaping type institutions are the ones who foresee future problems that are going to face the industry and propose and develop solutions for them, from now. They should not wait for the industry to tell them (that is the tech-following). They should leap the industry, and in doing so they are constantly pushing forward and pulling up the tech development curve. This is what we are trying to do at KFUPM. It’s not always obvious and we are not always successful in doing this, but this is exactly our aspirations.
 
This is why we graduated three cohorts already in Hydrogen Mobility, three cohorts in Nonmetallic Materials, three cohorts in Quantum Computing, and so on. And this is why we introduced AI+X three years before the ChatGPT craze. We are trying to foresee what is going to become important as solutions to tackle future problems and be ready, both in research and education, to meet the requirements of tomorrow.
 
So, to sum up, this first part of my letter, I said that the objective of KFUPM is to expand the Saudi and global economies by establishing new sectors in the Kingdom that need investment but also talent – not just any talent but economy-creating talent – and they need to be taught in a tech-leaping manner.
 
I foresee about 3-4 more letters to come, which are also not going to be easy to write (and maybe for you not easy to read). I am already feeling their burden, though, but I hope that you find them valuable! :)
 
Thank you very much.
 
Best wishes,
 
M. M. Saggaf
President, KFUPM