Most countries today understand the importance of capacity building, developing the skills, technologies, and supporting infrastructure needed to compete in the world today. In practice, however, most of the smaller developing countries do not have a clear strategy for focusing their limited resources in ways that are likely to support economic development and growth in the decades ahead. This chapter suggests that biosciences could form the basis for such a strategy, based on clear external market opportunities which would demand-pull the development of knowledge-based business/industrial clusters. The new markets for bioindustrial products are diverse, and are usually considered separately by investors and development agencies, which means that the opportunities to build common support platforms are often overlooked. A better development strategy for countries with limited resources would be to build the educational and training systems needed to support the development of a wide spectrum of bioscience industries. The island nations of the Caribbean are taken as the model of the kind of small, middle-income economies that could benefit most from this strategy.
Elsevier, McCreath and Delgoda, Pharmacognosy: Fundamentals, Applications and Strategies, 2016, Pages 677 - 685
