If Denis Hugenin of Alterg, a French company that has been attracted to Scotland, is successful in the research and business development programme backed by ITI Energy, then a new disruptive technology will be born.

For technologies that have the potential to enable hydrogen to be stored cost-effectively, safely and efficiently could potentially gain major market share in a wide range of applications.

It is still relatively early days – it will be the end of the year before the research is translated into a number of applications and a number of resulting business plans. And it will be perhaps a further two years at least after that, before products are really developed, but it is already looking encouraging.

We would urge all potential investors and partners developing this sector of business to talk to Alterg and look at what they have to offer. If it is a winner, we must hope that the maximum possible amount of those “winning”, the resulting business and economic benefits will be developed here in Scotland.

ITI Scotland, the programme of intermediate technology institutes, is a major economic bet for Scotland, involving as it does £450 million of taxpayers’ money over the next 10 years. The Alterg project and nascent business is exactly the kind of emerging technology development that the framers had in mind when the ITIs were being conceived.

The figures for Scottish Development International on the amount of research and development attracted over the last year, which we also reveal today, is further encouraging news as is the fact that the average inward investment project size is 30% greater than the UK average. Scotland also attracted 11% of the new jobs secured across the UK – better than per capita of population.

These figures are good news but let nobody suggest that our economic performance is where it should be. In overall performance we still trail the UK as a whole and we face increasing competition from reviving English regions, never mind the southeast and London juggernaut and wider international competitors.

Mind you, if an entrepreneur and scientist of the calibre of Denis Hugenin could be persuaded to quit the south of France for Scotland, then the ITIs must already be doing something right.

Steel yourselves for the future

While the legal battle over Ravenscraig still rages, the players behind the £1 billion regeneration scheme are determined to move forward with their plans regardless.

They find themselves in the strange position of having valid outline planning permission to start developing the site despite there being a continuing challenge against the scheme that has yet to be determined in the House of Lords. So why go ahead and take the risk that the Lords will not ultimately rule in their favour? Well, the Ravenscraig Partnership believes it has waited long enough.

This scheme has been in the making for 12 years – inching its way at a snail’s pace through conceptualisation, the planning system, the political machinery and then the courts system. All along, there have been objections that the project could adversely affect neighbouring towns like Motherwell and Wishaw by stealing away their shoppers and businesses.

And all along, the people behind the project – Scottish Enterprise Lanarkshire, Wilson Bowden Developments and Corus – have argued that they will create something spectacular, something that is not available already in North Lanarkshire. There have been promises of “shoppertainment” and indoor ski hills and quality housing and quality jobs.

While “the powers that be” have sided with the vision set out by the Ravenscraig Partnership, the reality is that we will not really know which side is right until the development happens. Since that now appears to be happening, we would hope Wilson Bowden and SE Lanarkshire will live up to the hype.

We want to see environmentally efficient housing and innovative technologically advanced communications between households. We want to see a train connection to the site actually materialise and the kind of office space that is going to attract a predicted 12,000 jobs. We want to see the American shopping centre developer Mills Corporation, or whoever is put in place to build the retail and leisure elements of the town centre, actually attract the kind of shopping we have not seen before.

We hope that Ravenscraig, a name that now symbolises Scotland’s heavy industrial past, will become one that embodies a thriving economic future but it faces a monumental challenge over the next 20 years.