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I. A Transformed ›Real‹ Economy? Manufacturing still matters within developed market economies (Daniels and Bryson, 2002a; Livesey, 2006; Bryson et al., 2008a; BERR, 2008). Manufacturing has altered over the last twenty years, but our understanding of this sector has been too influenced by associations with declining traditional industries (Fingleton, 1999). The word manufacturing can conjure up images of pollution, heavy engineering, smokestacks and industrial decline. Manufacturing is often considered to be part of the old economy that has been supplanted by the rise of a new economy (Daniels et al., 2006). The debate over the new economy was one constructed rather services and was also one that largely ignored manufacturing (Wood, 2002). This is surprising as the new economy is completely dependent upon inputs created by the old economy or the real economy. The old economy has never gone away and it is possible to argue that the literature on the new economy fails to appreciate that manufacturing has changed; manufacturing has been transformed and continues to evolve, but out understanding has not kept pace with these alterations. The skill sets that are required for competitive manufacturing have altered and many manufacturing companies are reliant on complex combinations of management, production, technical and service skills. This has important implications for working, learning and the development of skills at the level of individual worker and also for organizations. It also suggests that successful manufacturing firms are reliant on their ability to create innovative strategies that will enhance wealth creation opportunities that comes from the sale of manufactured products and attached services. This is an important point in that the skill sets required in manufacturing now include services that are embedded in processes and production systems, but also services that are embedded in products. The latter also include services that are designed to support products, for example the provision of training, product updates, advice centres, the provision of finance packages, etc. All these require skill sets and competencies that are not traditionally associated with manufacturing. In the media the emphasis has been on employment decline in manufacturing and the rise of service jobs; journalists cover factories that are closing in an area, but often fail to provide coverage of firms that are expanding or manufacturing firms that have been recently formed. The image of manufacturing decline in the developed market economies was highlighted by Jim Womack, chair of the US-based Lean Enterprise Institute, a research group, when he noted that »if you told most people in the US that the country was still the biggest manufacturer and is likely to remain so for some time, they would say you were lying […] There’s a lot of negative feeling in the US [about manufac-