The paper attempts to explore the role of innovation in industrial and economic development of a country and tries to offer an overview of some of the challenges and key elements that may be significant in building an innovative industrial base in Africa. This is triggered by the belief that poorer developing countries do not exactly depend on innovation to remain competitive on the global market. In other words, innovation is seen as key to advanced economies with sophisticated firms that invest significant resources in research and development (R&D), which is not the case with most developing countries. Hence the processes of technical change led by innovations are usually seen as a privilege of industrialized economies. In this paper, we attempt to show that African countries that seek to develop competitive and sustainable firms or economies have to develop, implement, promote and invest in innovation policies, plans and strategies.