Consumer products giant LG’s new super laboratory on the edge of South Korean capital Seoul has to be seen to be believed.

Occupying a site roughly the same size as University College London’s Bloomsbury campus, LG’s science park includes 20 buildings occupied by 18,000 researchers and support staff. A second phase of the scheme will add another six buildings and take the number of workers up to 25,000 by 2022.

Remarkably, there isn’t any product design taking place here. Instead, this army of researchers is working on cutting-edge science, the building blocks of the products manufactured by LG. This marks it out from many Western manufacturers, which design products using other people’s components. Take the iPhone as an example. Apple’s biggest money-maker uses displays manufactured by LG and Samsung, another South Korean industrial behemoth.

Asia is rapidly overtaking the west when it comes to innovation. The US, the EU and the UK have negative or zero growth in patenting new ideas and are outperformed by China and South Korea, with high patent growth in Singapore and India

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