1) Free EducationThe Saudi's have a recently reformed education system, complete with a freshly built full-fledged research university: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST.)
KAUST has a more Western model of education, instruction in English, American and European faculty, partnerships with multiple Ivy League institutions. The current President of KAUST is Jean-Lou Chameau, who was previously the president of Caltech.
Perhaps most significantly, the university is granted greater freedom of speech and thought than probably anywhere else in Saudi Arabia. Saudi royalists politically protect the University, while the campus's isolated location prevents random acts of "law enforcement" by the religious police.
KAUST has an endowment of $20 Billion USD, which puts it in the same league monetarily with H/Y/P and is about twice the endowment of Oxbridge.
So the Saudis are investing in the right things in advanced education at least: alternative energy, desalinization technology, chemical engineering...
They're also building a series of new model commercial cities along the coast where they will attempt the same thing on a city-state scale. The religious rules will be less strictly enforced in these model cities, but far more importantly (for commerce), they will have independent judiciaries (still based on sharia fiqh law), but with written standardized laws of contract (uncertain contracts have put a strain on the Saudi economy.) They're also considering relaxing the onerous permitting regulations required to start a business.
It seems like the Saudis' want to have their cake, and eat it too. On the one hand, they want the benefits of Western higher education and economic systems. But on the other, they want to maintain a fundamentalist religious monarchy.
I cannot really see that being successful. The academic freedom needed to conduct meaningful research is diametrically opposed to the restrictions on thought and expression in a repressive theocracy.