Lifetime employment once made sense, says Mr Murayama, because the company's strength lay in production engineering, and the ability to innovate through small engineering improvements requires a good deal of experience.

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"In the field of robotics or mechanical engineering, the ability to create a moving part without any welding removes a lot of the barriers to prototyping, " Martins said.

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In the wake of its recalls, Toyota found that its highly centralized, engineering-centric communication structure slowed down its ability to understand early warning signals about quality.

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In a second study involving women in a predominantly male engineering setting, the intervention increased women's ability to handle daily stressors.

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Resistance to genetically modified foods, technical difficulties, legal and business obstacles and the ability to develop improved foods without genetic engineering have winnowed the pipeline.

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"We are paying for this in our science, technology and engineering industries, but also in people's own ability to earn funds and manage their lives, " he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

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Gore's 10, 000 employees, who work mainly in engineering and manufacturing, take on leadership roles based on their ability to "gain the respect of peers and to attract followers, " says Ms. Kelly, the CEO.

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However, as India and China continue to emerge, the abundance of engineering talent will mean that great companies will be defined not by their ability to develop a faster widget, but by their ability to innovate.

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American officials have previously cast doubt on Iran's ability to extract useful intelligence from the captured spy plane, and have said that reverse-engineering a copy would be beyond Iran's technological capability.

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