The purpose of this Ten-Year Innovation Plan is to help drive South Africa’s transformationtowards a knowledge-based economy, in which the production and dissemination ofknowledge leads to economic benefits and enriches all fields of human endeavour.The plan builds on previous work undertaken by the Department of Science andTechnology (DST). It is not, however, a compendium of existing programmes. Instead,it is a high-level presentation of the principal challenges identified by the DST, startingnot from where South Africa is today, but where we should be a decade from now.The core projections for 2018 are summarised as South Africa’s “grand challenges”in science and technology.