How do you order the machinery for a production line manufacturing a totally new, revolutionary product, which was invented in a faraway country in a scientific culture totally different from our own?

The answer, according to the chief executive of Bicester company Hardide, Jim Murray-Smith who has found himself in exactly that position is to engage the right, innovative people to work out a way of adapting existing machines to new functions.

He said: "Hardide is the world's fastest-growing engineering coating company. It is a great story of endeavour and success, and it is all down to the people who work here. Oxfordshire is a great place for entrepreneurs."

Hardide was formed in 2000 to exploit technology for producing super-hard coating for steel components, such as oil drill bits, which had been developed in Soviet Russia.

At that time, Mr Murray-Smith was working for Isle of Man financiers Flintstone Technologies, trawling through Soviet inventions. He picked Hardide developed in Russia by a team which included Yuri Zhuk, the present technical director as a potential winner.

This year the company, which employs 33 people three in its Houston office; the rest here will turn over £2.9m. Next year it plans to turn over £5m.

But what is this unique product, and who are its main customers?

It is a tungsten carbide coating produced by chemical vapour deposition, making it harder and thinner than anything else on the market. Its main customers are in the oil industry.

Standing near a box of beautifully machine- tooled drill parts, coated with Hardide, Mr Murray-Smith told me we were looking at about 50,000 dollars worth of kit but cheap at the price!

Lifespan These drill bits, some perhaps destined to travel deeper into the earth than ever before, have a lifespan of months, not weeks. It is easy for a potential buyer to work out the eventual saving to the bottom line.

And of course, as luck would have it, the rising price of oil can do Hardide nothing but good. Mr Murray-Smith explained: "In the North Sea, for example, it is now becoming economic for companies to exploit reserves that would not have been viable some years ago. This is an important market for us."

He added: "One customer from the North Sea Brent field told me the other day that his company was landing half a beach a day'. In other words, they were bringing up a lot of sand and sand is extremely abrasive."

A Scotsman himself, he is fulsome in his admiration of Oxfordshire and its spirit of enterprise.

He said: "None of this would have happened had it not been for such people as Lucius Cary, whose company put up some initial money when we moved to Begbroke Business Park to develop the project."

He added that the high quality of people in Oxfordshire, some of whom worked from 7am until late every day, was amazing.' He said: "People have come to us from TWR, (the racing team which went into liquidation) and from Alcan. Where else would I find such highly-skilled people?"

Mr Cary is a venture capitalist, a founder of the Venture Capital Report at the Oxford Business Park, which puts ideas and capital together.

He is also a director of various venture capital trusts, which specialise in backing technological ideas developed within 40 miles of Oxford.

Hardide was formed in August 2000. In 2001, it moved to Begbroke Science Park in Oxfordshire, where it developed a pilot coating facility with rigorous testing of the super-hard material.

Floated

By the autumn of 2003, Hardide had completed a £2m fund-raising exercise which enabled it to move to its present Bicester site. The company floated on the Alternative Investment Market in April last year.

The oil industry may currently be the biggest market for Hardide but it is by no means the only one. Waiting to be further exploited are applications in such industries as food manufacturing, chemicals, and aerospace.

There are also many applications in the field of cyrogenics, since the hair-thin coatings can stand up to extreme cold.

But could all this be just too much good news for Oxfordshire? Could the opening of an office in Houston mean that this success story will shortly transfer itself to the other side of the Atlantic, as has happened with so many British developments in the past?

"Not at all," replied Mr Murray-Smith. "Indeed, quite the reverse. The Americans are sending people here to learn how to train people there."

So it seems this is one area where an idea developed in Britain will not migrate.