If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.
In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.
If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.
You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.
Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.
Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.
What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.
We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don't just try to make money out of money.
I'm afraid I am tidy, and I have to be because the office is open plan and my glass office door is literally always open.
Reality TV is anything but.
If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.
We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.
Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.
The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.
People buy products if they're better.
As a modern employer you have to treat people well.
If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.
Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.
Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don't need great big vacuums anymore.
So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.
