They include pharmaceuticals, chemicals, telecommunications, hydrocarbons, biotechnology, electrical engineering, computer software, financial services - all unequivocally knowledge-intensive activities.It is too often said that we are not good in this country at technology transfer, but we have, in fact, been good at the transfer of elite science to the pharmaceutical, aerospace and biotechnology industries. In many of these new industries we have a strong position in world markets - an advantage we must be careful not to throw away.For too many people, Britain has a proud heritage. We invented the steam engine, the jet engine, the Hovercraft. The names of Newton, Darwin, and Faraday are known world-wide.

Our promotional activities tend to cement this view by plumping for the safe option - Stephenson's Rocket rather than the Psion Organizer.We need instead to build up knowledge among trading partners of contemporary British hi-tech achievements. The Millennium Products activity is useful here, in showing that the UK is still at the cutting edge of design and technology. We need to show that Britain is the home of Crick, Hawking and Dyson, of world-beating, hi-tech companies such as Oxford Instruments, BP, and Glaxo-Wellcome, and of break-out discoveries such as Dolly, monoclonal antibodies and optical fibres.I want people when they think of this country to think of such scientific achievements as Thrust, the first supersonic car, rather than Stephenson or Faraday.I want "Lara Croft" of Eidos's Tomb Raider computer game to be an ambassador for British scientific excellence.With other themes relating to "the knowledge economy" - education, competition policy, infrastructure - the approach does indeed represent a "third way" industrial policy, one in which government assumes an enabling rather than a directive role.A government not blinded by the white heat of technology, or interested in picking winners, but concerned with a competitive framework.. ST ANDREW'S Day, and Scotland chooses the English Queen to open the new Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the building that at last gives the country a single place where it can house the treasures that define its past national identity: from the Penicuik Jewels to an 1806 Newcomen beam engine.

It is coincidence, but the opening happens amidst a turmoil of questions about the definition of Scotland's future identity. Down in London the creation of the Scottish assembly is seen in party political terms: is whatever is happening good, bad or indifferent for the Labour party? But as anyone who has spent much time across the Border this autumn will know, in Scotland it is a time of wonder and worry: is something seismic starting to happen, something as important as the union of the two parliaments in 1707, that will lead to an independent Scotland on the model (more or less) of the Republic of Ireland? Unsurprisingly, much of the current debate has been about money - as indeed was the debate in 1707 - but about money in a curiously static way. The viability of an independent Scotland has been dissected in terms of the amount of money that Scotland receives in public spending from the UK as a whole, and the amount it raises in tax. Thus Donald Dewar in a lecture a couple of weeks ago dwelt on the costs of a break-up of the union, of "reinventing in Scotland everything from Customs and Excise to the Intervention Board for Agricultural Produce, from the Benefits Agency to the Foreign Office, from National Insurance to the National Debt".True, Mr Dewar went on to argue in favour of the union in political terms as well - "Is there really a crying need for a separate seat at the UN?" - but in so far as the debate is about economics, it is about dividing up the cake, rather than making a bigger one.The reason for this, I think, is simply that there are good figures for tax revenues and public spending for Scotland, so you can have a good, meaty debate rather than an airy-fairy one.