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There's not much consolation for the 252 people at Dundee's NCR plant whose jobs in the manufacture of cash machines have just become yet more casualties of the downturn.

These are going to be hard to replace.

This is part of the boom and bust of economic hopes that businesses build up, local people come to rely on them, they then decline and go.

It fits into a narrative of industrial and manufacturing decline: Linwood no more, Ravenscraig no more, etc.

But the NCR story says more than that, and despite the pain of job losses now, there is a more positive story to tell.

The Ohio-based company is a grand-daddy of inward investors in the modern era, having arrived in Dundee in 1946.

It came to Scotland to exploit the skills of the post-war workforce.

It adapted to technological change as shop tills moved from the mechanical to the electronic, pioneering the manufacture of the cash machine, just as Scottish banks were pioneers in deploying them.

American bosses could see there was more to Scots than a relatively cheap (at that time) source of labour.

They could see the potential for harnessing brain-power, and built up a large research and development presence on Tayside.

And for all that people are hurt by the loss of 252 manufacturing jobs, it can be overlooked that 450 R&D jobs at NCR are remaining in Dundee.

Would that other inward investors had put down roots in the same way, and been encouraged more effectively to do so by the Scottish Development Agency and its successor, Scottish Enterprise.

Apart from IBM in Greenock, there are few other such companies that moved from production to high-end innovation and service delivery in the same way.

Far more often, they moved in cheap production and then moved it on, as central Europe and Asia opened up.

The jobs were important to help the transitions of the Scottish economy, but in the end, they often left only empty plants and dashed hopes.

Research and development jobs may not ship tangible products to the world, but these higher-value jobs are the best prospect for the Scottish economy.

They use Scotland's most valuable resource - innovative brain-power - and they are much less likely to get shipped elsewhere due to cheaper labour costs elsewhere.

That said, developing nations - notably China and India - are producing huge numbers of highly-trained technicians, with ambitions to win business at every level.

There is no reason to be complacent about the research advantage, particularly as there isn't nearly enough R&D by Scotland's private sector.

But nor should we overlook the significance of what there is.

Indeed, one of the biggest spenders on R&D in recent years has been this blog's dear friend, the Royal Bank of Scotland.

In recent years, it has ranked up there with Shell and BP in the top 15 R&D spenders in Britain, investing more than £300m annually on software development to improve its financial and business services.

With RBS looking for £2.5bn of cost cuts, it wouldn't be surprising if that budget is among them.

Meanwhile, attention in Dundee will turn to the public sector's efforts to help NCR manufacturing workers find new jobs or training places.

The challenge there is not only that the recession makes it exceptionally difficult to find alternative employment: it is also that the public sector is not as clear as it was in providing a response.

Scottish Enterprise no longer takes a role in responding to such closures and unemployment problems.

It may try to help attract another inward investor, or persuade an existing one to expand.

But much of the work falls to Skills Development Scotland, which now has Scotland's 1,000-plus career advisers on its payroll.

In addition, the 2007 Concordat between the SNP Government and councils means that local economic development falls to the 32 local authorities.

The new role came with hardly any new budget, and was handed over when the economy was still booming.

While Dundee City Council may be of a scale to handle the challenge ahead - let's hope so - it is far from clear that all the others can.