Costed Action Plan for SADC Industrialization Strategy and Roadmap 5.4 Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Education is key to capacity development and for SADC to graduate to a competitive knowledge-based economy high level specialisations will be crucial, notably tertiary education and specializations in science and engineering disciplines. The data for SADC countries show a highly differentiated but generally unsatisfactory performance. The role of R&D is progressively being recognized as an important technological facilitator. The initial conditions within the SADC region, however, indicate that the countries are yet to raise their R&D expenditure to levels that match that of their comparators. Within SADC, South Africa stands out with a R&D ratio to GDP significantly higher than any of the other Members while the wide gap between the region and the comparators underlines the magnitude of the catch-up challenge. 5.5 Programme of Action for Capabilities Development 5.5.1 Business environment and competitiveness (i) Creating a business-friendly and competitiveness-aware environment. (ii) Developing high quality entrepreneurship and consolidation of national and regional business associations. (iii) Encouraging entrepreneurial clusters and facilitating links between entrepreneurs and universities and research institutions, to speed up the utilization of their knowledge spin-offs and thereby encourage start-ups formation and growth. 5.5.2 Education The core building blocks should be: (i) Reorientation and repurposing education to facilitate industrialization and transformation with emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. (ii) Establishment of partnerships between universities, research institutions and the business community to fast-track utilization of knowledge generated for production. (iii) Governments to fund collaborative research that involves industry and the academics. (iv) Identification/strengthening/establishment of Centres of Excellence and/or Centres of Specialization. 5.5.3 Innovation The focus should be on the creation of national and regional innovation systems to speed up the accumulation of technological capacity and develop its linkage mechanisms. The programme components should include: 44