      
Innovation systems and science and technology (S&T) projects supported by the World Bank have taken on many forms in the past several years. The Bank’s involvement in industrial technology projects started in the 1970s, with Israel and Spain numbering among the first countries to receive support in the form of industrial technology development.
| Education for the Knowledge Economy |
The most common category of S&T-related projects comes from the education sector and reflects the World Bank’s multidimensional efforts to equip countries with the highly skilled and flexible human capital needed to compete effectively in dynamic global markets. These efforts encompass a broad range of projects that help to build an education and training system that enables developing countries to meet the challenges of the knowledge economy, including: Vocational Training Projects Technical Education and Training Projects Higher Education Projects Learning Centers and Networks Projects Labor Force Development and Life-Long Learning Projects New Learning Techniques Projects  
| R&D: Producing New, Economically Relevant Knowledge |
The ability of a society to produce, select, adapt, and commercialize knowledge is critical for sustained economic growth and improved quality of life. Today, a handful of the world’s richest countries produce the overwhelming majority of new scientific and technological knowledge, and they derive great benefit from its use. Meanwhile, the most of the rest of the world’s nations struggle, with varying degrees of success, to establish scientific and technological research systems that can invigorate their economies and provide solutions to their social needs. Unfortunately for developing countries, the logic of S&T research systems favors the scientifically strong becoming stronger. Countries that want to improve their S&T capacity have to make extra efforts to gain and maintain the “critical mass” beyond which benefits start to accrue. To make matters worse, this process is long term and full of uncertainty, and scarce resources are always under pressure from competing needs. The World Bank has implemented a variety of initiatives to boost STI capacity in the client countries. These include: Millennium Science Initiatives (MSI) – Centers of Excellence Projects Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for the Knowledge Economy Projects
| Technology Acquisition and Diffusion: Using Existing Knowledge to Improve Industrial Competitiveness |
R&D is only the tip of the technology development process which, in addition to R&D includes such non-R&D activities as: (i) skills for acquiring, using and operating technologies at rising levels of complexity, productivity and quality and (ii) design, engineering, and associated managerial capabilities to acquire technologies, develop a continuous stream of improvements and generate innovations. Different skills are most relevant at different stages of technological development. For example, R&D is most relevant for firms that are closing in on the technological frontier or already at the frontier. Technology acquisition and utilization skills, on the other hand, are most relevant for firms that are at the technology acquisition, assimilation or deepening stages. Hierarchy of the Structure of Industrial Technology 
Agricultural and manufacturing enterprises in most developing countries currently operate far below the technology frontier. This suggests that much of the scientific and technical knowledge that these countries will need to increase growth and productivity has already been discovered and utilized elsewhere. The challenge for poorer economies is to develop the capacity to absorb, adopt, and adapt this existing knowledge for use in local firms. Efforts to boost developing countries’ STI capacity, therefore, should attempt to boost their capacity to use existing knowledge as well as their capacity to produce new knowledge via improved R&D. This also entails helping enterprises develop the managerial and organizational capacity that they will need to utilize better trained workers and more sophisticated technology. The following project implemented by the World Bank has been addressing these issues: Agricultural Technology Projects Private Sector and Industry Technology Projects
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