It is hoped the book will inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs at the Colin Sanders Innovation Centre in Banbury.

Mr Sanders achieved world wide fame in the recording industry for his innovative mixing consoles which allowed producers to automate their settings by computer control.

Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, George Martin and Peter Gabriel were among the stars to contribute to the book, a testament to Mr Sanders and his colleagues at Solid State Logic (SSL), the company he founded.

Tragically Mr Sanders was killed in a helicopter crash outside his Souldern Manor estate in 1998. He was aged 50.

A trust fund set up by his wife, Dr Rosemary Sanders, contributed £250,000 towards a media studio at the Colin Sanders Innovation Centre, which opened a year later in Mewburn Road.

She said her husband, who had a rare combination of entrepreneurial flair and a talent for electronic design, would have approved of the innovation centre.

"He would have been very pleased with it," she said. "He thought business was very important for the good of the country."

Mrs Sanders said the SSL Black Book would help to explain some of the history behind the centre and may provide inspiration to the many start-up businesses based there.

The centre's chief executive Dr David Kingham said he was honoured to receive the book and was pleased that six years after the centre opened it continued to support a range of innovative media and technology businesses.

Among them, Summerton Mill's new stop-animation children's programme is now being screened on the BBC.

Mr Sanders founded SSL in 1969, aged 22, to build electronic control systems for church organs.

By the early 1970s he had moved out of his parents' house in Oxford to a nearby village where he set up a workshop and studio.

His SL 4000 series console was unveiled at the 1977 AES convention in Paris and became a phenomenon in the recording, and later broadcast and film industries, with further models in the years that followed.

Mr Sanders won the prestigious UK Design Council Award and Queen's Award for Export Achievement in the UK in 1981.

It is claimed more hits have been made on SSL consoles than any other. It is a feature of more than 3,000 studios worldwide.

Mrs Sanders, a former consultant anaesthetist at the Horton Hospital, said her late husband was self-taught and built his first tape deck in his bedroom aged ten.

She said he was a perfectionist with an incredible attention to detail, who was charismatic and very popular with his staff.

"He was very intelligent and could do everything and anything. He had an amazing amount of energy, " she recalled.

"Although he didn't perform he loved music and had a really good ear for it."

Mr Sanders left SSL in 1991 as a multimillionaire and went on to pursue other projects, including high tech induction cooking systems and water filtration technology.

He was a generous benefactor to the Banbury community and took an active role in village life in Souldern.

Mrs Sanders will host the official presentation of the SSL Black Book at a ceremony tomorrow, joined by family friend Gyles Brandreth and other business and civic leaders. The book will go on permanent display at the centre.