The key cause of the competitive gap between nations and organisations is knowledge. The rule of competition today is more dependent on exploitation capabilities than on resource endowments. If anything, there seems to be a stronger relationship between countries’ performance in S&T and their economy than other variables. However, as the rest of the world has advanced technologically, Africa has fallen relatively further behind.  The STI-development link on the continent is still rather weak.

Introduction

There is a growing realisation that transition into modern economies will involve considerable investment and use of new knowledge prosecuted mainly through science, technology and innovation. Science is widely accepted as any systematic methodology which attempts to collect accurate information about reality and model these in a way which can be used to make reliable, concrete and quantitative predictions about future events and observations. Technology is described in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD)  Main Science and Technology Indicators as a body of knowledge, which is used systematically by a given society at a given moment to resolve concrete problems in accordance with culture and scale of value. Innovation is understood as a process in which the organisation or nation creates and defines problems and then actively develops new knowledge to solve them.

The emphasis here is on knowledge development but not its creation. While it may be necessary to create new knowledge to solve certain problems, it is no gainsaying that most problems in the developing world do not require esoteric advances in knowledge but the effective assimilation, adaptation, use and improvement of existing knowledge.  In fact, as perceived in the technology-gap approach to the analysis of economic growth, the potential for exploiting knowledge developed elsewhere is one of the key factors that give rise to economic growth in a nation.

If we take science as the generation of new knowledge, technology as the application of scientific knowledge, and innovation as the economic application of science, technology and other forms of knowledge, it can then be safely inferred that it is the synergy of Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) that leads to economic progress.

Science, Technology, Innovation and Development: Proof of an Inherent Link

The key cause of the competitive gap between nations and organisations is knowledge and realisation that competition today is more dependent on exploitation capabilities than on resource endowments, a expounded in  Prusak L., Davenport's Working Knowledge and Hamel G. and C.K Prahalad's  Competing for the Future. Today, nations can no longer compete based purely on natural resource and locational advantages. This is exemplified in the fact that numerous industrialised countries are poorly endowed with natural resources and the least industrialised nations are those with rich resource and favourable climatic endowments. If anything, there seems to be a stronger relationship between countries’ performance in S&T and their economy than other variables.

For instance, according to OECD's The Second European Report on S&T Indicators, the economic progress recorded in the 50 leading S&T countries is much higher than in the rest of the world. While the average wealth per capita in these 50 countries grew by 1.1% between 1986 and 1994, the per capita income of the other 130 countries of the world fell by 1.5% over the same period.

Unfortunately, as the rest of the world has advanced technologically, Africa has fallen relatively further behind.  From 1988 to 2001, the number of scientific articles published worldwide grew by 40%.  Africa not only failed to keep pace with this growth but also publication counts actually declined by 12% in absolute terms.  In 1988, Africa accounted for 1.26% of all scientific publications; by 2001 its share was only 0.76%. And as the technological intensity of trade has grown, Africa has seen its share of world trade decline. Africa accounted for 2% of global merchandise exports in 1990, but only 1% by 2002.

It has been argued that not all peripheral regions can become centers of technology entrepreneurship like Taiwan and Israel but the nations that have invested heavily in higher education—particularly technical education—are the best positioned to compete in these industries. Most of the developing economies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have failed to make such investments. In fact, most African countries still spend below 1% of their GDP on education. Consequently, the Human Development Index (HDI) and Gross Domestic Product Index (GDI) which are measures of the social well-being of a nation are generally low for Africa. The average GDI for Sub-Saharan Africa is 0.63 compared to 0.71 for East Asia and the Pacific and a world average of 0.75. In 2003 the HDI for Sub-Saharan Africa was 0.515 compared to 0.768 for East Asia and the Pacific and a world average of 0.741. This is in spite of the abundant human and natural resources that the continent is endowed with.

Re-Conceptualising The Link Between Science, Technology, Innovation and Development

In today’s fast-paced global economy, the lines between science and technology as independent fields of study have become more blurred. Historically, technology has benefited immensely from science, and it has in turn made the prosecution of science more productive through the development and application of new devices and techniques. As a result of this forward and backward linkage, the idea of Science and Technology (S&T) as a hybrid concept is now widely accepted.  S&T now refer, not to a pair, but a single unified concept which is generally characterised by a number of distinct activities. These activities typically include: Science and Technology research, Experimental Development, Science and Technology services as well as Science and Technology capacity building.

In the past two decades, innovation has evolved to become, not just an activity under S&T but a key variable in the development equation due to the realisation that a nation becomes competitive on the basis of knowledge, the application thereof and the speed with which new knowledge is acquired. Thus, the joining together, of science (increasing what we know), technology (applying what we know) and innovation (turning our applied knowledge into economic benefits and promoting the acquisition of new knowledge through learning-by-doing) is more useful than the singular contributions of of science or technology. Indeed, until S&T capabilities are effectively diffused through innovation, the benefits derivable from S&T are not actually realised in an economy.