Fifty years ago, if you had asked what gave a company its value, the answer was largely physical: factories, inventory, land, machinery. Today that answer has almost inverted. According to Ocean Tomo’s 2025 Intangible Asset Market Value Study, intangible assets now account for approximately 92% of the market capitalisation of the S&P 500, up from just 17% in 1975. Look closer at the top of the index — Apple, Nvidia, Costco, Lilly, Mastercard — and some 98% of their market value is IP-related. Value has quietly migrated from what you can touch to what you can think, protect, and communicate.

That shift has arrived in the Gulf with unusual speed. Saudi Arabia’s patent applications jumped sharply in 2025 under Vision 2030, with national institutional filings rising roughly 80% year-on-year. The UAE has climbed to 30th in the WIPO Global Innovation Index 2025, the highest position ever held by an Arab economy. Dubai’s D33 Economic Agenda is channelling an estimated AED 32 trillion of cumulative economic activity through innovation-led sectors by 2033. In July 2025, the UAE signed an Accelerated Patent Grant Agreement with the US Patent and Trademark Office, materially shortening the distance between an idea and a defensible right. The GCC Unified Trademark Law — now operational across all six member states, with multi-class filings and new protection for non-traditional marks — has turned the region into a single enforceable market for brands.

Two newer announcements sharpen the picture considerably. The UAE AI Act 2026 came into force in March, introducing a four-tier, risk-based compliance framework with penalties of up to AED 10 million for non-compliance and a self-assessment deadline falling in September 2026. In parallel, the National Cyber Security Strategy 2025-2031 has shifted the UAE’s posture from capacity building to active defence, and the UAE Cybersecurity Council has launched three post-quantum readiness programmes — the National Information Assurance Programme, the National Cybersecurity Index Platform, and the National Post-Quantum Migration Programme. AI and cybersecurity are not incidental examples. They are the paradigmatic innovations of this decade — invisible, reproducible, and worth nothing unless you can both assert rights in them and persuade the market to value them.

This is where the argument connects. Innovation, in 2026, is a three-legged stool. The first leg is the invention itself: the algorithm, the formulation, the method, the interface. The second is legal protection: patent filings, trade secret protocols, trademark registrations, copyright assertions, and the increasingly specialised layer of AI governance documentation that the UAE AI Act now requires. The third is strategic marketing: the narrative that turns a protected capability into a credible, purchasable promise. Remove any one leg and the whole structure collapses into cost.

I have seen all three ways it falls over. A GCC fintech builds a genuinely novel fraud-detection model, misses its patent window, and watches a larger competitor ship a close imitation to market six months later with better collateral. A regional software firm files diligently, secures its IP, then describes the product in such technical, jargon-heavy language that buyers cannot articulate why it matters. A third — I have worked alongside several of these — crafts a beautiful brand narrative around “AI-powered” capabilities that, under the UAE AI Act’s tiered framework, would now almost certainly require disclosures the company never made. That last failure is the most dangerous: marketing alone, unsupervised by legal, can manufacture liability faster than it manufactures demand.

The regulatory environment is pushing in only one direction. The EU AI Act becomes fully applicable on 2 August 2026, including labelling obligations for AI-generated content that apply extraterritorially to any GCC company selling into Europe. Dubai Customs’ Project Zero, launched in November 2025, has tightened counterfeit enforcement and re-engineered how seized goods are handled. SAIP in Saudi Arabia is now accredited as an International Searching and Preliminary Examining Authority under the PCT, and in 2025 became the first IP office in the Middle East to join WIPO’s Digital Access Service. The enforcement machinery is getting faster and more sophisticated; the tolerance for sloppy protection and loose marketing is getting smaller. Companies that treat innovation as a purely R&D exercise will file late, position poorly, and over-claim casually. Companies that get it right will have their General Counsel and their Chief Marketing Officer in the same room, on the same brief, from the first sketch forward.

The Ocean Tomo number is worth returning to. Ninety-two percent of the value in the index you most want to resemble is something you cannot physically lift. That value is constituted — quite literally — by a bundle of legal rights and a bundle of market beliefs. The companies that understand this treat every significant innovation as simultaneously a legal instrument and a marketing asset. Everyone else is leaving the multiplier on the table.

“Intangible assets now constitute approximately 92% of S&P 500 market capitalisation, up from just 17% in 1975 — a 75-point shift representing an economic inversion in the very nature of value creation.”

— Ocean Tomo, 2025 Intangible Asset Market Value Study

If your most valuable innovation of the last eighteen months were challenged tomorrow — in court by an imitator, and in the market by a sceptical customer — would your legal filings and your marketing story defend each other, or contradict each other?

— Ocean Tomo 2025 Intangible Asset Market Value Study: https://oceantomo.com/insights/ocean-tomo-releases-2025-intangible-asset-market-value-study-results/

— 98% of Apple, Nvidia, Costco, Lilly and Mastercard Value is IP-Related (IPWatchdog): https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/03/30/ninety-eight-percent-of-apple-nvidia-costco-lilly-and-mastercard-market-value-are-ip-related-intangible-assets/

— WIPO Global Innovation Index 2025 — Results: https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/global-innovation-index-2025/en/gii-2025-results.html

— UAE IP Law Recent Developments 2024-2026 (Nour Attorneys): https://www.nourattorneys.com/articles/uae-ip-law-recent-developments-2024-2026

— UAE AI Act 2026: Tiered Risk Compliance (6clicks): https://www.6clicks.com/resources/blog/uae-ai-act-2026-tiered-risk-compliance-regulated-businesses

— Cybersecurity 2026 UAE Trends & Developments (Chambers and Partners): https://practiceguides.chambers.com/practice-guides/cybersecurity-2026/uae/trends-and-developments

— Gateway to Innovation: Saudi Arabia’s Economic and IP Transformation (SABA IP): https://www.sabaip.com/gateway-to-innovation-saudi-arabias-economic-and-ip-transformation/

— GCC Unified Trademark Law (Al Tamimi & Company): https://www.tamimi.com/law-update-articles/gcc-unified-trademark-law-key-provisions-and-challenges/

— EU AI Act Transparency Obligations for AI-Generated Content (Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer): https://www.hsfkramer.com/notes/ip/2026-03/transparency-obligations-for-ai-generated-content-under-the-eu-ai-act-from-principle-to-practice

— D33 Economic Agenda (Meydan Free Zone): https://www.meydanfz.ae/blog/d33-agenda-dubai-explained

The views expressed in this newsletter are Jonathan Ashton’s own personal perspectives and do not constitute legal or professional advice.

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