Any minute now a geeky, bespectacled chief executive in Kyoto will pull a rather striking fact from his sleeve - that global sales of Nintendo's Wii games console have broken 50 million units and sales of the handheld DS machine have passed 100 million.

Truly majestic figures, but it should be a Briton up there crowing on the podium: we British say that we are world-class managers and arch innovators, we say that we make great entertainment and are global thinkers. If this were true, that geek should have been British. We should have invented the Wii.

Nintendo has chirpily defied the death spiral of worldwide spending. But rather than drooling over its record 2008 profits, we should be furious that the man from Kyoto (and his small herd of nerds) has a better instinctive and creative sense of what makes us happy.

We should be piqued that Nintendo spotted long before us that you no longer have to be an electronics hardware producer to produce electronics hardware. We should be feverishly working out how British skills, innovation and management can generate the next bestselling gadget in a world where software and ideas hold sway.

It may seem myopic to focus on Nintendo, and to emulate its specific success is not the point. The trick is for Britain to follow the same mental route - analysing our lives and turning that into a saleable machine, rather than a premium-rate phone line, a selection of comedy ringtones or a credit default swap.

We are supposed to be great inventors, accomplished marketers, expert parsers of the consumerist psyche, and yet the score is 50million-0 to the geek in Kyoto who clocked that the entire world wants fun, simple, activity-based games for the whole family to enjoy on the cheap. He thinks, we buy.

There are many products besides the Wii that Britain buys an awful lot of, does not make itself and did not think up. Forget them: we should be annoyed that even on the supposedly level field of ideas, Japan and the US still hold dominion over our living rooms and pockets.

This has nothing to do with those tired epitaphs for British manufacturing: there is nothing magically Japanese about the Wii's hardware. It is worth voiding the warranty and taking a screwdriver to the back of a Wii to see just how well Nintendo has played the modern, commoditised components market and how easily Britain might have done the same. Many of the parts beneath that alluring white case are bought “off the rack” - standard widgets that anyone could source from a friendly chap in Taiwan, Singapore or South Korea. The more complicated gizmos, including some of the parts on which Nintendo holds patents, were designed and built in partnership with companies such as IBM and NEC. The whole is assembled in various locations around the world.

This simplifies a process that is necessarily crammed with industrial secrets and complexity, but industry analysts agree: the barrier to entry for a British Wii - let's call it the Pretendo - is no longer the hardware. The Wii is just a superbly packaged concept about how we consume entertainment and the Pretendo must be the same.

Surely we are capable of that? There are three possible answers to whether we are: one cheerful, one technical and one unsettling.

The optimistic view is that Britain is just as inventive as it is cracked up to be, and that this recession represents perhaps the most fertile opportunity for that brilliance to disgorge a machine that radically redefines a market and sells in its tens of millions around the world. There is a sense that the British business model is due for a fundamental shift and, with financial services no longer seducing ambitious young minds, the prospects seem enticing. The pathetic pound would make Britain a competitive Pretendo exporter.

The second possibility is that while Britain has all the right qualities to come up with an idea as good as the Wii, it will let itself be daunted by competing against such well- established players as Sony, Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft. Capital for the Pretendo must be raised and staked, new partnerships forged and entrenched foes confronted: an undeniably tall order when the whole business of financial risk-taking is hanging on by the skin of its teeth.

Ultimately, however, the future of the Pretendo may rest on something more brutally simple: perhaps we're not fun enough to dream up simple, harmless fun. Are we still a nation of inventors who, like the brains at Nintendo, lie awake at night wondering how a motion-sensitive controller can simultaneously entertain a six-year-old Korean schoolgirl, a Greek fishmonger and a Chilean accountant? Do we have a FTSE 100 chief executive who could stand before investors demonstrating the use of a virtual hula hoop?

Or are our games makers too serious to spend time working out the precise flight dynamics of a cartoon Italian plumber in a bumblebee suit?If so, best leave it to the geeks in Kyoto.

Leo Lewis is the Asia business correspondent of The Times

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