Pragmatic economist Professor John Kay, a member of Scotland's Council of Economic Advisers, is convinced that countries should develop on existing strengths. "They should ask themselves: 'Why would we be better at that industry than anyone else?'," he says.

So what about invention? As that frequently involves the morphing of two or more disciplines, a pragmatic view of Scotland's recent Technology Showcase in Glasgow would indicate that electronics has quietly embedded with the best.

Design LED Products, set up in 2004, spent its early years on R&D to produce its first products by 2005. "This year," says business manager Iain Kyle, "our first product is appearing in high street consumer appliances. It could be in your kitchen around late summer".

The Livingston-based company uses off-the-shelf LEDs, screen printing the light-guide and embedding the LED within that. Previous light-guides have been expensive injection mouldings, which are difficult to use in design.

The thin, flexible segmented layer device, 1mm thick with uniform and controlled light, can be used for a variety of illumination needs. So a sandwich of multiple light grade LEDs can be segmented onto a screen, like a PC, to light up different areas, with differing colour or brightness.

"Initially we were talking to regional companies," explains Kyle. "Now we are talking to multinational OEMs". With a lot of projects on the go, he admits that "the OEM cycle is never as fast as one might wish, but the market includes automotive, medical and consumer applications".

Perth-based Tanya Ewing (pictured) won the top female inventor prize at the Biggart Baillie Innovation Awards last year with Ewgeco, her energy monitoring device. Her original idea was sparked by anger - she wanted to know how a large gas bill had been clocked up, when an outside meter, difficult to access, measured consumption in cubic feet with no translation into invoiced kilowatts.

"A lot of people get confused by how their bills are calculated. Because utility meters are outside or hidden in cupboards, you can't see what's going on," says Ewing.

Ewgeco is being trialled in businesses and homes in Scotland. If an appliance or tap is turned on, a wall-mounted device shows how much electricity, water and gas (LPG and oil to come) is being consumed, using green, amber and red lights as consumption increases. Ewgeco also measures energy use of individual appliances, such as TVs.

Not all Scotland's electronics companies operate in the high visibility spectrum. Dunfermline-based SFX Technologies and its Gel Audio hydrogel transducer technology turns most surfaces (glass, plastics, metals, wood, composites and even some fibrous materials) into loudspeakers, says director David Stewart. Its GA 20.0 device, which is in development, intriguingly involves "bone conduction for military and medical uses".

Think data acquisition as a career move is dull? Don't be fooled. Two Scottish companies, D-TACQ Solutions and Alpha Data, are at the forefront of scientific work. For fast data acquisition D-TACQ Solutions is a supplier to Glasgow University, one of five university partners, five national research centres, four helicopter manufacturers and one SME involved in a 16-partner GOAHEAD helicopter wind tunnel model project.

D-TACQ Solutions director Peter Milne notes that a key to the project is Robert Gilmour, who hides his considerable technician light under a bushel of work, which includes having developed the only CAA-approved fully instrumented autogyro plane. Gilmour, who admits to "losing most of my hair doing that", says that D-TACQ data acquisition boards interface data collection from two sets of pressure tail-rotors to the central computer.

Alpha Data is an established company whose Virtex 4FX-based analogue capture card is being used in the CERN Proton Synchrotron in Switzerland for a recently developed new trajectory measurement system.

"The FPGA-based system has 120 analogue signal acquisition channels connected to FPGA-based digital signal processing to derive positions of the particle bunches undergoing acceleration in the synchrotron," says director Graham Smart.

The system continuously samples 120 analogue channels at 125MHz, 14 bits and processes this data in real-time to determine information on the position of particle bunches, as they orbit at around 437kHz. The system captures and processes 15 billion samples per second, based on Alpha Data's Xilinx Virtex 4FX100 FPGA platform.