Hello, I’m James Dyson, a designer and an engineer, and I’m going to talk about how engineering must change the world. But I’m here under false pretences: I’m not a businessman. Nor am I into the business of business – you know, the bottom line of buying and selling, profit and loss, mergers and acquisitions, shares and shareholders. So in conventional terms, I’m not the most qualified person to contribute to this podcast series. Except that the business of engineering excites me, and engineering makes good business.

Without a doubt, engineering has changed the world, and will continue to change it. All around the world, there are more and more inventions being developed than ever before, and the pace will get faster, not slower. It will change all our lives, and then change them again, and again.

But what do we mean by engineering? Many people think of Mr Fixit – the bloke that fixes your washing machine or comes to the rescue when you dial the AA. In fact, the most famous engineer in Britain is rumoured to be none other than Coronation Street’s Kevin Webster, a car mechanic. And yes, maintenance is an important part of engineering, and thank goodness for the people that take care of our trains, boilers, cars and cookers. Without them, the wheels would stop turning, and our dinner would go uncooked. But it’s not the main picture. Engineering for me is about being inventive, solving problems, being creative, and actually making things. Like making the maglev, or designing jet engines, or engineering more efficient wind turbines, or saving a life with a new kind of kidney machine. That’s engineering. So don’t let anyone fool you into thinking it’s dull, or that it doesn’t matter. It does.

But what you might call the Corrie model of engineering is being hardwired into the next generation. In many British businesses, the engineer sits way down the food chain. Meanwhile, much further up, is the marketing team. Marketeers have become immensely powerful in influencing what new products should be built, and what features they should include.

One reason for the ascent of the marketeer, is that their recommendations are usually based on evidence, good, earnestly gathered evidence – of what sells, and what does not. Armed with these insights into people’s behaviour, the marketing director becomes the arbiter of what sells. Sounds good? Well, I’ve no problem with market research based on evidence. But too great a swing in power from the engineer to the marketing man would create a static society. Why? Because the reality is, they are arbiters of what has been selling, not of the unknown breakthrough yet to be invented. That’s where the inventor comes in. The genius of the design engineer is his or her ability to think the unimaginable, and then go ahead and do it, even if potential customers expect something more familiar.

Henry Ford, the pioneer of popular motoring, reflected: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Indeed, having recognised that the level of public expectation was much lower than the lofty height of his vision, Ford got on with his tinkering, exploding and inventing of gasoline engines, and ultimately, the Model T Ford. I find it interesting though that he’s remembered far more for his system of mass production – essentially an economic achievement – than for his experiments with race cars, and his search for a magic metal, light enough and robust enough for the rutted roads of rural America. It was vanadium steel, in case you’re interested.

To me, it’s regrettable that the engineering genesis is lost in the word Fordism, which has come to mean a philosophy of high manufacturing output. His output of inventions was pretty prolific, too. He made the first really reliable engine, then, the quadrocycle, the transmission mechanism, the Model A automobile, followed by the Model B, then AC, C, F, K, N, R, S, before finally creating the Model T. Oh, and I mustn’t forget the A4 tri-motor aeroplane. The admirable thing about Ford, was that he was a quietly persistent engineer who ignored the received logic of that era. At that time, his rivals saw the automobile as a luxury good, targeted at the rich and idle, and made to order. Ford imagined instead a car readily available to all, requiring a huge leap in performance and many years of hard work. Indeed, his forefather Thomas Edison remarked: “Opportunity passes by most people, because it dresses itself in overalls and looks like work.”

You see, traditional thinking may be safe and comfortable, but it won’t give you a leap in performance. It may not even be safe, because the future arrives quicker these days. To the business bureaucrat, that is a cause for worry. To the entrepreneurial rule breaker, it’s what makes business exciting. Great ideas emerge in response to new circumstances, or because you’re frustrated with a poor product or service and you want to see if you can do it better. But if you hope to be a creative rule breaker, you’ll have to learn to live with opposition. The more original your idea, the more resistance you will meet. I suppose this would be my first law of invention: just because an idea’s not been thought of before, it’s easy for someone to miss its importance, or, more irritatingly, to catalogue all the reasons why it could fail. Even venture capitalists adopt a disdainful tone when turning you down for a loan to build a manufacturing business. I speak from experience: I was written off by the City when I approached them for a loan to start making my vacuum cleaner. The grounds for the rejection? Engineers can’t know what makes a good business plan, surely.

Today even, my delight in engineering and manufacturing is seen by many as eccentric or downmarket. “So that’s what you do, is it?” And then there’s the geek factor. Engineers, like scientists, conjure up stereotypes of bearded men with a questionable taste in jumpers. This misperception of science and engineering jobs as geeky, dirty and dull puts young people off from what in reality has the potential to be a bright, exciting and profitable future. The result is that we produce only 24,000 engineering graduates a year, compared with 300,000 in China and 450,000 in India. And don’t imagine that Indian and Chinese engineers are stuck forever at the grunt end of the market. China’s education minister has commendable ambitions to change the ubiquitous ‘Made in China’ label to ‘Made and Designed in China’. And look at the Indian conglomerate, Tata, famous for buying up the likes of Tetley tea and Corus steel. But Tata’s not all about acquiring foreign brands. It’s also made research and development central to its strategy. It realises the value of intellectual property. Like the aforementioned Henry Ford, in turn of the century America, Tata is working to create India’s people car, at a cost of just over £1,000. And in a strange twist of fate, it’s also about to gobble up Jaguar and Land Rover.

So, what to make of the rise of Tata? Quite simply, Britain has to go back to its roots. As our balance of trade sinks into the red, we have a choice: do we want Britain to be a theme park, or a hub of creative engineering? We’re currently on course to shuffle into a sort of residential home for retired great powers. But it doesn’t have to be like that. In fact, the globalisation of business and trade opens us up to more opportunities than ever before. For example, global warming which was caused by engineering must be cured by engineering. Britain was the first to trade globally, through the rapid expansion of the Empire, but we’ve lost our confidence to engineer and make things that we had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

So what should be done? How can engineering, a business that has and will change the world, change its own fate? Of course, government tax breaks for research and development are welcome, but we have to get to the root of the problem. The starting point has to be education. We have to stem the gravitation of our young people towards philosophy, sociology and media studies. As interesting as these subjects may be, they’re not going to provide us with a workforce which can create practical solutions to our twenty-first century challenges of energy, housing and an ageing population. Engineering can. This is why I’ve been working for some years on plans for a school of design innovation which will open in Bath. It’s a new kind of school, supported by the government, which will encourage Britain’s next generation of engineers, designers and inventors. How? Well, it will bring the exciting, risky, real world of engineering into the classroom. Apart from that we won’t have classrooms. Instead there will be flexible workshops, surrounding an atrium where prototypes of engineering icons – successful or failed – will provide inspiration for young people. While classrooms aren’t on the cards, teachers are: sixty expert and enthusiastic staff will be backed up with input from industry. The likes of Williams Formula 1, Rolls-Royce, Airbus, Rotork and the Science Museum – they’re all getting involved by donating pieces of inspiration. A school that greets you with a wrecked Formula 1 car, and prototype aircraft wings, is just a bit different. A school that exposes children to risk and failure, even more so. But failure is what makes us succeed. It’s a great paradox, but one that all engineers learn to embrace. I learnt to relish failure in the five years, 5,127 prototypes, failure after failure, that it took me to engineer my vacuum cleaner. And I’m still embracing failure today, both at Dyson Research & Development alongside 500 other enthusiastic failing engineers, not to mention in Bath, as I struggle with the doubters and bureaucracy which delay the Dyson School being built. Talking about success and failure I was struck by a massive irony recently. While visiting Nanjing in China where Dyson’s hand dryers are manufactured I noticed the quick progress of the Nanjing automotive company, neighbours to our factory. It took only twelve weeks for them to build the factory and in week 16 Rover cars were coming off the production lines. Meanwhile, back in Bath, 16 weeks after submitting a planning application for the Dyson School a planning officer tells us that he’s not had sufficient time to write his report on our application. Six months on, and he still hasn’t. It’s at times like this when I need some words of support, and Thomas Edison does the trick. “I have not failed, I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” Yes, ten thousand of Edison’s ideas flopped. Edison’s enterprising fear would have got him nowhere but for one thing: perseverance. In the end, his ten thousand flops fade into insignificance alongside his 1,093 US patents. They include the Dictaphone, the mimeograph, the stock ticker, the storage battery, the vitascope (leading on to motion pictures), the carbon transmitter (leading on to the invention of the telephone), and his joint invention of the light bulb. Like all inventive engineers, Edison succeeded by failing. So the message for the future students of the Dyson School, and perhaps for me, as I battle to get the place built: never surrender.

Now, back to the business of this podcast: business. Unfortunately, the never surrender mindset doesn’t sit well with City investors, who simply want a quick return. Business, you see, is often driven by short-term results: this quarter’s figures, or this month’s figures even. But a long-term view is needed for research and development, because new technology can lead to greater long-term success. That’s why I say to any budding inventor, carry on failing, it works.

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