Speech by Chris Powell at the EESW Welsh National Convention
of Excellence in Engineering & Technology, 21 March 2005

Good afternoon everyone.  I’m delighted to add my welcome to you on behalf of NESTA.

Our organisation’s purpose is to invest in great ideas and in the people who have them.  So we invest in innovators. We invest in inventors. We invest in engineers. And we invest in people who are bringing new ideas into education.

The Engineering Education Scheme has all of these and more - so it’s not surprising that we are investing in this scheme as well. And I’ll explain the nature of that investment in a moment.  

NESTA was set up by the Government through an endowment five years ago with a mission to pioneer new ways of supporting and promoting talent, innovation and creativity in science, technology and the arts.

Our work includes supporting inventors at the very early stage of their work when it is difficult for them to find funding. We also have an education programme that supports people who are finding new ways to help people learn.  We also have a fellowship scheme which provides creative people with exceptional talent with time away from their regular work to develop their ideas.

My own background is one of a career spent helping people communicate, specifically through the medium of advertising.

And when I came here today I was struck by two things. The first was the exceptional degree of talent that is on display here shown by teenage engineers, encouraged by the very willing support of many Welsh companies and the Welsh Assembly Government. That’s the good news.

The second thing that struck me - the not so good news – is that while this is a display of very real achievement for many individuals, schools and businesses, on a national scale it is really a display of potential – it shows us what can be done when the right combination of factors come into play. But it is not what is being done everywhere.  Out there, beyond the Celtic Manor Resort, not enough talented young people are directing their potential into engineering, and not enough promising new inventors are getting their innovations to market.

If we want to see more of the potential released then there are some lessons here in this very well-established programme – and they chime with what we have learned at NESTA in the short time we have existed. So what are they?

Promoting engineering
The first lesson is very simple. We need to promote engineering in such a way that young people ‘get it’.  

Britain currently risks running short of engineers.   In 2002 more than 31,000 students took Physics A level. In 2004 that had fallen to under 29,000.  Media Studies had nearly as many students with 27,000. And psychology was way ahead with 47,000 entries.     

There has been an 11.4% fall in engineering graduates across the UK since 1995-96.

How do we make more young people enthusiastic?  I wouldn’t claim to have all the answers but I can make some suggestions. 

The first and obvious answer is to have a curriculum which fills young people with enthusiasm for engineering. And as Jane has explained, there are a number of things going on in Wales that should help to achieve this by breaking down the artificial divide between academic and practical learning and raising skill levels across the country.

The Learning Pathways strategy for 14-19 year olds is central to encouraging more students into engineering fields.  The new Welsh Bacc will also offer opportunity for students to maintain a wide range of skills including science and technology rather than having to choose either arts or science based A levels. 

The Children’s University in Wales is another initiative that will introduce the flavour of modular structures at an early stage.   

As anyone who has watched a five year old absorbed with construction toys knows, the foundations for an interest in engineering can be laid early on, and the emphasis you are putting on practical types of activity at Key Stages 1 and 2 should be helpful. And when we all come back in 2020 we’ll know whether it has worked!

A second point in promoting engineering is that we have to communicate the excitement of engineering. This programme clearly communicates well with its target audience and attracts people to come on board. And while this is not the same as communicating with the population of school students at large, I think the lesson is that we need to speak the right language. We need to talk to young people in a straightforward way, bereft of jargon – and I’m not sure whether that is a greater challenge for education or business.  

NESTA’s Learning Programme is backing one publication which aims to do this.  It’s a magazine called Flipside aimed at the youth market and published by the Institution of Electrical Engineers. The basic premise of Flipside is articulated by its editor in chief. He pointed out that a typical style magazine doesn’t say things like ‘Relevant to key stage 3’ on its cover.  It tends to have something more enticing to offer. So if you look at Flipside today, you’ll find articles on night vision goggles, smart fabrics, the ‘crane that won an Oscar’ and weird food. In which incidentally you find the important information that ‘anything that hops needs to be refrigerated’. The magazine’s distinctiveness is that it then goes further than many might into the science and engineering behind these stories.  

A third way to encourage more people into engineering is to provide good role models. This operates on several levels. One level is to turn young engineers themselves into advocates for engineering. On the Connexions website, there is an excellent article written by two undergraduates in Bristol. It’s titled Engineering + University = Fun. They give a good flavour of what engineering is really about. They insist they have never met an engineer who wears sandals. And they say that what engineering really means is that “one day you’ll be in the lab building a model bridge and the next you’ll be out and about in the countryside avoiding the cows while you survey their field with an oversized ruler.

“This might sound a bit peculiar”, they add, “but it’s situations like this that lead to the best friendships around.”

That article ends with the killer fact that engineering is third only to Medicine and Dentistry when it comes to job applications. And that takes us to another persuasive point to make in communicating the value of engineering. Engineering often equals spectacular success. 

Bill Gates is an engineer. James Dyson is an engineer. Many successful individuals are engineers. The owner of this hotel and resort, Sir Terry Matthews, is an engineer whose companies have been amazingly successful and who is also a leading entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Helping engineers gain business skills
That takes me to a second lesson from this scheme. To be a really successful engineer you need to be more than an engineer.

This scheme helps young engineers become successful by teaching them skills beyond engineering – skills such as teamwork, problem solving, personal development and communication.

If we can start to make young innovators aware of these skills at an early stage – and year 12 will certainly do – then there is much more chance of their becoming successful if they later become innovators who want to run successful start-ups.

In our experience the big problem among innovators is not the quality of their innovation – we actually have many bright ideas to choose from – but the lack of management skills.

Innovators have typically spent most of their working lives innovating and they are often far too optimistic about the time it will take to bring their product to market. And being very able, often brilliant, people, they can find it difficult to accept that they do not possess all the skills needed to commercialize their innovation.   These young people are learning now that they not only have to have bright ideas, but communicate them and sell them well.

Mentoring and support
One of the lessons we have learned – and clearly it is understood in this scheme, is that support for innovation consists of far more than finding creative people and giving them money.

The non-financial support we offer is often more valuable in the long term than the money.

And one of the main aspects of that non-financial support is to provide innovators with mentors, guides who can help them progress through the various stages of a project.

Here we are seeing just how much willingness there is among experienced engineers to act as mentors to those who are starting out. The companies involved in the Engineering Education Scheme are a roll call of engineering quality.

The lesson from the mentoring aspects of this scheme is in the detail - such supportive  relationships need to be well structured. People nominated as contact points; time allotted for brainstorming and the residential sessions; and access to high quality facilities for the young engineers.

Building bridges between cultures
A further lesson from the scheme is the importance of bringing people from different backgrounds together – in this case people from education and industry. Our most recent award to the Engineering Education Scheme is designed to develop even better links between teachers and industry engineers. We are supporting a series of seminars called simply Better Education Business Links. These will offer a more in-depth opportunity for teachers to improve and build on their experience and knowledge of industry – and vice versa. The seminars this year will enable teachers and company representatives to work together to develop the work experience programme, and to compile a guide to best practice in future industry/education collaborations.

An interesting piece of work was done in preparation for the seminars, based on a video in which professionals from education on one hand and industry on the other talked about their experiences. Representatives of each sector were then asked to underline words they did not understand in each other’s comments. No less than a third of each script ended up being underlined, demonstrating that teachers and executives instinctively talk different languages and use different jargon.  Breaking down the barriers of language and culture is fundamental to aligning everyone behind the goal of identifying where real innovation lies and doing something to nurture it.

We have found a parallel problem, incidentally, in the differing perspectives of investors and innovators.

Investors tend to follow proven patterns – looking to repeat last year’s success, whereas. Innovators tend to be non-conformist, in ideas, working patterns and dress codes.  Investors like to see track records. Innovators may not have one.  Investors look for growth forecasts. Innovators often want their businesses to be better, not bigger.

However, once investors get to know the creative world, they have more confidence in it.  In a survey we carried out, nearly half of those who had not invested in the creative sector thought creative business models were too risky. But that figure dropped to 14% for those who had actually invested in the sector.   

Bringing people together, developing a common language and understanding common objectives is something that needs to be done at all levels and in many more ways. 

Capturing ideas and taking risks
The final lesson from the Engineering Education Scheme is that it captures great ideas and helps those that have them to take the risks they need to take to bring their projects to fruition.

Companies frequently report that students see things with a fresh pair of eyes. They have no fear of thinking laterally and acting on their intuition. The companies then help students to manage the risks involved in applying those ideas and making them come alive.   

And this is precisely what we aim to do in NESTA with innovators who have been around a little longer but who still need the support that we and others can give in turning an idea into a product, turning a brainwave into a business.   

Here in Wales for example we are supporting Starbridge Systems, based at Technium in Swansea and winner of a SMART Wales competition. They are creating a revolutionary micro-pump that can be worn like a sticking plaster or patch the size of a 50 pence piece by people such as diabetics who need to take regular doses of medicine. The pump allows its wearers to carry a three day supply of medicine around with them – inconspicuously – and infuse their medicine so they no longer need to use syringes. And when you consider that there are 175 million diabetics in the world, this could obviously improve a lot of people’s lives.  

Another innovator we are supporting in Wales is a biochemist, Osborn Jones, based in Caernarfon.    He has developed a diagnostic tool called the PicoPak, or the lab in a Matchbox – also a SMART award winner, which has potential to trace the source of a food poisoning outbreak such as Ecoli in less than four hours, compared with current methods that take up to a day.  The benefit of Osborn’s device is that his tiny box with four interconnecting chambers can carry out work that is otherwise done in a succession of manual laboratory tests.

A very different form of innovation has been devised in North Wales by Richard Hutchins and Mike Walker, who have pioneered a method of turning waste tyres into useful products and feedstock for other industrial processes without producing carbon dioxide instead of dumping them in landfill sites.   Richard is an engineer who has worked for many years in the tyre industry and was inspired to do something by the waste of potential and environmental problems he saw as thousands of tyres were dumped without any attempt at recycling. He is still fighting to get his innovation to market and he has persevered despite a sponsor pulling out and major problems in getting funding. While there are other backers who are prepared to come on board after the first research phase, only NESTA has been prepared to get involved at the early stage.

Conclusion
And this of course is also what the Engineering Education Scheme is doing – getting involved at the early stage, when innovations are just ideas.

And if I might finish on a more philosophical note, I believe that the key to promoting engineering and encouraging more people to become innovators and engineers is not any particular policy or formula. It’s simply to get more people – in education, industry and policy-making - fired up by the idea of innovation.

One company with strong links to Wales is Sony – which now has a Cardiff born Chief Executive, Sir Howard Stringer.  Sony was launched by a small group of engineers working in a bombed out department store in Tokyo in the aftermath of the Second World War. At first they didn’t succeed. Their first product was a rice cooker which didn’t work properly. But they persevered and the results were the transistor radio, the Walkman and the Playstation – as well as many jobs in Wales.

When they were having their most difficult times, their founder, Masaru Ibuka, sat down and wrote a manifesto for the company. He didn’t write about the commercial problems or the funding difficulties, but he stuck to his passion and his principles. He wrote that the company should be a place where engineers could experience the joy of innovation and work ‘to their heart’s content’. 

I think what we are seeing today is the result of engineers being given the space and encouragement to work on what they get excited about. And in all of our initiatives and programmes I can think of no better guiding principle for anyone who wants to make Wales and the UK the powerhouse of engineering and innovation that all of us here today want it to be.  

We need to give innovators support, mentoring and business skills. But above all we need to give them space. Give them time. And let them work to their heart’s content.

Higher Education Statistical Agency for 2003