Celebrated mathematical physicist, Professor Francis Kofi Allotey, says the way forward to create wealth and promote industrialization in Africa is to aggressively promote entrepreneurial innovations.

He said although science and technology was the catalyst for development, it needed to be boosted with “creative imagination and value addition to knowledge” by the entrepreneur.

That, he said, was the path towards transforming and creating wealth for the people.

Prof Allotey, who is the President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) was speaking at the 2nd International Conference on Applied Science and Technology (ICAST 2015) at the Kumasi Polytechnic.

The three-day meeting organized by the polytechnic was under the theme “Technological innovation for accelerated national growth and development”.

He highlighted the importance of science and technology, labelling it as the “international currency upon which fortunes of nations would rise and fall”.

He said it was refreshing that developing countries were waking up to the reality that the creation, mastery, utilization of modern science and technology was basically the difference between them and the industrialized world.

“The widening gap in economics and influence between the nations of the South and the North is also essentially, a manifestation of science and technology gap”, he added.

Prof Allotey urged political leadership to provide the right environment to take discoveries out of the laboratories into the market and into the hands of those who would benefit from them.

Africa, he stated could not afford to miss the enormous economic and social transformation brought about by science and technology-led enterprise.

He said what the leaders must do was to provide adequate funding – heavily invest in science, technology and mathematics education.

They should encourage young people to focus on finding scientific solutions to benefit society and take them forward through entrepreneurship.

Prof Allotey also called on the management of higher academic institutions like polytechnics, to develop mechanism to support young and budding entrepreneurs through scientific fora, incubation centres and entrepreneurship, coaching and training.

Prof Nicholas Nsowah-Nuamah, Rector of the Polytechnic, said the conference was to help researchers disseminate their research findings.

It was also to provide the platform for the exchange of ideas, experiences, research findings and knowledge among the academia, industry, policy makers, civil society and development partners.

Oheneba Adusei Poku, the Akyempinhene, stressed the importance of research to development and urged scientists to do more to make their inventions accessible and beneficial to the society.