The move toward knowledge based processes and products is driving a rapid change not only in the products themselves but also in how business is conducted. This clearly poses a threat to many traditional businesses but it could provide immense opportunities for those willing to adapt to this rapidly changing environment. Such companies could expect not only to attract new customers but also to add value to their products and grow. Clearly, for cross-cutting and enabling technologies such as thermal spraying, the next decade will be especially challenging. 

One consequence of this new business paradigm is the change of emphasis from “basic technology” to “information” and “knowledge”. Indeed data management (control and retrieval) is central to industrial activity both within companies themselves and increasingly within large, well established, supply chains. Today, many companies use a range of Web based tools and their own intranets to store and access data. However, the Web itself is changing and the next generation of the Web, the so-called Semantic Web, is set to revolutionise how business is done. One aspect of this is that data will have additional information (tags) which help to describe it and more significantly, put the data into a context. This not only adds extra information but significantly advances the ability to track down relevant information and knowledge. While the emergence of Semantic Space may take some time to come into being, the generation of Semantic Tools has already begun and some of these offer very powerful, new opportunities for business development. A central feature to this is the development use of ontologies which essentially define the relationships between objects. Such developments will allow data to be automatically mined in order to generate knowledge and this offers a whole new dimension in industrial activity.