Why are you backing the MMS show?
"Manufacturing as a discipline and an industry is vitally important. We need to nurture it and its participants. Shows and exhibitions that are too specific sometimes are good if you want to buy a particular product but often you need people to get out of their immediate environment to meet and exchange ideas and build their personal store of concepts. Getting ever more focused on a subject brings about good results, but you mustn’t forget that the most radical new ideas come from cross-fertilisation."
How important is it to get out of the factory to pick up best practice ideas? And what’s the best advice you’ve ever been given doing this?
"In all areas of business it is important to take time to “work on the business” rather than “work in the business”. This requires some quiet time for your brain to piece together the best solution to a particularly thorny problem, but also to recognise and admit that you don’t always have the answers and that there are many other people around who have equally good brains and plausible solutions.
"Innovation rarely happens in one person’s head alone. Those who innovate take ideas from others, sometimes from completely different fields and utilise those ideas for their own specific issue."
Who is your manufacturing superhero and why?
"Living on the South Coast I can’t fail to admire the single-minded drive of Reginald Joseph Mitchell. Not only did he create the phenomenon of the Spitfire and the multiple winners of the Schneider Trophy but his aircraft also broke the world air speed record.
"However it is not just the achievements but the attitude to engineering and manufacturing that strikes a chord. It is no good just thinking up something complicated that has to have lots of additions to cover all eventualities, if something is simple and works it is inherently fit-for-purpose. As he was once quoted as saying: 'If anybody ever tells you anything about an aeroplane which is so bloody complicated you can't understand it, take it from me: it's all balls.'
"Many engineers have followed this philosophy since, but I believe he is one of the first to be recorded as voicing it."
Find out more about Medatech UK by clicking here
