ABSTRACT
For many industrializing countries like Malaysia, the issues associated with technological development are beginning to assume an important dimension. These countries are attempting to industrialize without the benefits of the long, more or less evolutionary process of technological change characteristic of mature industrial nations. The industrial world has had three centuries of experience in S&T following the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the eighteenth-century industrial revolution. For Malaysia, the process of industrialization depends critically on the process of acquiring technological competencies. The process of national industrial development can be identified with the process by which the nation keeps on accumulating technological capabilities. The direction and speed of such development are influenced by the direction and speed of a nation's endeavor to develop its S&T capabilities. Unless there is a concurrent development of strong S&T capabilities, the country runs the risk of being in a permanent state of dependence without acquiring its own know-how and skill to manage its industrial development.
