Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.
James Dyson
Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly.
Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.
You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.
The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.
When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.
Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.
As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.
At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.
Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.
When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.
If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.
People buy products if they're better.
In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.
As a modern employer you have to treat people well.
The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.
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.
There's nothing wrong with things taking time.
When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren't important.
We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.
Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.
We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.
Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.
Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.
Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.
I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.
I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don't necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.
Well, I'm rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven't apparently made them with a great love for what they're doing.
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.
Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.
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.
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.
I don't believe in brands.
I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.
I own every share of my company, and I don't want to sell any of it.
Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.
If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.
It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.
Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.
We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.
The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.
People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them.
I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.
Fear is always a good motivator.
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.
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.
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.
