“Reverse engineering is very useful and may trumps research and development in emerging countries”

*By Woroud Al-Dossari

We often think that research and development (R&D) is the key to boosting a country’s economic development. In fact, this is not the case in emerging countries, especially in the early stages of economic development. Instead, initially focusing on reverse engineering is more important.

Here I plan to bear out this claim with a few historical examples, but first a definition. Reverse engineering is the process of extracting information from an existing product and understanding the manner in which it was produced with the goal of replicating it. The possibility of reverse engineering is what causes armies to be careful about what they leave behind on a battlefield. For example, the US Army tries to destroy its stranded military assets to ensure that rival militaries are not able to capture and reproduce them.

Although it is fundamentally imitative, reverse engineering can involve innovation too. For example, inspecting and copying a table is straightforward, but one can follow that by developing a superior table, or devising a more efficient production process. These modifications are important in enabling the derivative product to avoid violating intellectual property rights, often embodied in patents. This form of reverse engineering is frequently a rapid way of promoting technological development.

Reverse engineering is a particularly attractive option for relatively poor countries for whom investment in R&D, which typically needs to be extensive and sustained over a long period, would be prohibitively costly. Faced with the primary responsibility of meeting its people’s basic needs, a low-income country can simply not afford to dip into the public purse for money to spend on R&D. Nor can it rely on the business sector to cover such expenditure, as occurs in richer countries. Accordingly, it is obliged to cut economic corners by having recourse to reverse engineering, an altogether cheaper and more viable option.

Careem is a company that specializes in providing delivery services. When it started up, it was not the first player in the region. Uber was already there and operating effectively. Careem started, then, by imitating what Uber was doing, or in other words engaging in reverse engineering, and eventually sought to improve on their service. At length Uber announced their acquisition of Careem for $3.1 billion

Reverse engineering is not limited to currently emerging countries. In its development stage following the Second World War, Japan sought to catch up with manufacturers in the western world by rebuilding or redesigning products, but it has continued to use this technique even as the world’s third largest economy. It has used reverse engineering not only in copying but in improving its competitors’ products so as to avoid merely replicating the original design. Notable successes include computer-aided design (CAD), the software that engineers use to produce schematics.

If the above cases all point to the virtue of reverse engineering, my final example speaks in favour of limited investment in R&D in a different sense. I refer to Sabic, a Saudi petrochemical, industrial polymers company 70% owned by Saudi Aramco and 30% by investors on the Saudi stock market. When it started in 1972, it lacked access to state-of-the-art technology, but, without initial investment in R&D, it nonetheless made rapid progress, by virtue of its canny exploitation of reverse engineering, to the point that it now contributes more than six billion in Saudi Gross domestic product (GDP). Needless to say, Sabic was supported by the Saudi government, taking gas from Saudi’s Aramco at a very competitive price. In this way the Saudi government was able to boost a promising company to the benefit of the national economy.

The country most renowned for reverse engineering today is China.  Since the ’sixties indeed it has been their forte. The most recent images of satellites suggest

that China has learned ways of fine-tuning reverse-engineered products, perfecting the art of introducing strategic changes so as to make their versions of a given article seem quite novel.

Many parts of computers, including software, hardware and networks, are susceptible to reverse engineering. For this reason I am of the opinion that Saudi Arabia and Gulf countries should not focus their energies on inaugurating state-of-the-art technologies, but should rather start where developed countries leave off. This is what has been done in many big countries like Japan, South Korea, and China, and we can take a leaf out of their book. Lately Saudi Arabia launched the Research, Development and Innovation Development Authority, but it would be useful too, I believe, to focus equal attention on reverse engineering, starting with less sophisticated items and working our way up to more sophisticated ones.

In the end, I want to affirm that the two processes considered – R&D and reverse engineering – don’t present an either-or choice. But, in the event of limited resources, an initial focus on reverse engineering is more beneficial than immediate investment in R&D. Not only can we apply reverse engineering to products, but also it may extend to the creation of new companies. At a certain point, research and development take over and become significantly important.

*Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of London

Twitter Account @Woroudaldossari