Korean machine tool manufacturers, for example, are today ranked somewhere between seventh and tenth on a global scale. Ten years ago such an industry just did not exist in Korea. Aerospace is one answer Hyundai has come up with. With only two current world players in civil aviation, there really does seem to be everything to play for, and Hyundai is positively interested in acquiring the requisite technology to eventually produce complete aircraft. Science consumes wealth.
Technology generates it.
What is obviously lacking is research that is clearly focused on the creation of new products for new markets. It is true that some of the sums devoted to the advancement of new knowledge might well percolate through to reach some enabling technologies, but even that is all too liable to look anaemic. Professor Carrie found that the 1993 total aimed directly at new products for new markets amounted to no more than 13 per cent of the total. Undoubtedly, since the advent of the Foresight and IMI programmes there has been a noticeable improvement, but a long road ahead still remains for the promotion of industrial competitiveness and new products within UK firms. What perhaps best characterises the UK's undoubted pre-eminence in chemicals, petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals could well be the fact that in all of these industries, the designing of the product and the designing of the process responsible for the product are, in many ways, inseparable.