The Italian obsession with pasta shapes is such that in the early 1980s, Voiello, the premium brand of Barilla, the world's biggest pasta manufacturer, commissioned the famous industrial designer Giorgetto Giugiaro to come up with the ultimate pasta shape - a shape that would retain the sauce well without absorbing it too much, as well being decorative or even 'architectural' (this was the time of nouvelle cuisine). Giugiaro literally 'engineered' a beautiful, futuristic pasta shape, made up of a tube combined with a wave. The shape was called Marille and was launched with a fanfare in 1983. Unfortunately, it was a total failure. The production run was limited, and the distribution poor, so it was difficult to get hold of. More importantly, the complex shape made it difficult to cook evenly?" Given the Italian passion for cooking pasta al dente,* unevenly cooked pasta was (almost) a cardinal sin.

In 1973, HMC announced that it was going to sever its relationship with Ford and produce its own locally designed car - the Pony. In the first full year of production (1976), HMC produced just over 10,000 Pony cars - 0.5% of what Ford produced and 0.2% of what GM did in that year. When Ecuador imported Hyundai cars in June 1976, the Korean nation was jubilant. The fact that Ecuador bought only five Pony cars and one bus from Hyundai was rarely mentioned and, if it was, dismissed as a minor detail; what mattered was that foreigners wanted to buy cars from Koreans - a nation of people who were then famous for producing wigs, stitched gar-ments, stuffed toys, and sneakers - namely, things that require cheap labour. Despite this totally inauspicious beginning, Hyundai grew at an incredible pace in the following years. In 1986, it made a spectacular entrance into the US market with its Excel model (an upgraded version of the Pony), which was named as one of the ten most notable products of the year by the US business magazine Fortune. In 1991, it became one of a handful of car manufacturers around the world that design their own engines. By the turn of the twenty-first cen-tury, it became one of the ten biggest automobile manufacturers in the world. In 2009, Hyundai (officially called Hyundai-Kia by then, having taken over its smaller domestic rival, Kia, in 1998) produced more cars than Ford did. By 2015, more cars with Hyundai or Kia marques rolled off production lines than did those branded by GM. It is an incredible story. If you had a time machine and went back to 1976 and told people that a totally unknown carmaker - really, little more than a glorified car mechanic's shop - from a poor developing country called South Korea, with a per capita income not even two-thirds that of Ecuador's, was going to be bigger than Ford in just over thirty years and make more cars than General Motors in less than forty years, they would have tried to put you in a mental hospital.

And indeed behind the success of Hyundai there were two, not just one, visionary entrepreneurs - Chung Ju-yung, the founder of the Hyundai group, and his younger brother, Chung Se-yung, who led HMC between 1967 and 1997 (he played such a crucial role in the launch of the Pony that he earned the nickname, Pony Chung). When almost everyone else thought that there was a snowball's chance in hell that HMC would survive international competition, not to speak of becoming one of the top dogs in the industry, the Chung brothers worked with an ambitious vision to build a company that could one day globally compete, as symbolized by their decision to ask one of the world's best car designers, Giugiaro, to design their first car. They sank the money made by other more established (and profitable) parts of the Hyundai Group to sustain what was initially a loss-making company - this is known as intra-group cross-subsidization. Important as these corporate leaders were, when you look more closely HMC's success story is not just - or not even mainly - about the individual brilliance of the heroic entrepreneurs.

And then there was the government. The Korean government created the space for the Hyundai and other carmakers to 'grow up' by banning the import of all automobiles until 1988 and the import of Japanese cars until 1998 (based on the logic of 'infant industry protection', which was also applied to other 'strategic' industries - see 'Prawn'). This of course meant Korean consumers putting up with inferior domestic cars for decades, but, without that protec-tion, Korean carmakers could not have survived and grown. Until the early 1990s, the Korean government made sure that HMC and other firms in strategic hi-tech industries, especially export-oriented ones, had access to highly subsidized credits. This was accomplished through tight banking regulations, which mandated prioritizing lending to productive enterprises (over house mortgage loans or consumer loans), and through state ownership of the banking sector (see 'Acorn').

The individualist vision of entrepreneurship and corporate success that has been a central myth in the currently dominant free-market economics may have made some sense in the early days of capital-ism, when scale of production was small and technologies were simple. In that environment, brilliant individual entrepreneurs could make a huge difference, although even in those days corporate success required more than individual brilliance alone. Since the late nineteenth century, with large-scale production, complex technologies and global markets, corporate success has been a result of collective - rather than individual - endeavour, involving not just corporate leaders but workers, engineers, scientists, professional managers, government policy-makers, and even consumers. As the intertwined story of the two noodle-obsessed nations, Korea and Italy, shows, in the modern economy, entrepreneurship is not an individual deed any more. It is a collective endeavour.