Multinational firms are spreading their operations in ever smaller chunks, changing the face of manufacturing. IPAs must adapt to this new environment, co-operating with governments and businesses to meet the challenge.

The term “global factory” was first coined by Peter J Buckley, director of the Centre for International Business at the University of Leeds, in an article in the Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies in January 2004.

In the article, Buckley foresees a new breed of “flexible factories” in which “all plants within the system can make all the firms’ product models and can switch between models very quickly by a combination of software and robots”. This is the global factory, and it is the future of manufacturing. “Globalisation implies a location near the customer, not a single large-scale plant,” he writes.