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.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

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.

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.

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.

When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.

If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.

Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.

If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

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.

There's nothing wrong with things taking time.

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.

I don't believe in brands.

The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.

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 don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

People buy products if they're better.

People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of 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.

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.

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.

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren't important.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

We need to encourage investors to invest in high-technology startups.

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.

I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you're going to do when you've got your degree.

We should have A-levels in vocational subjects.

We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.

I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

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.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

Reality TV is anything but.

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.

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.

I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

Emerging markets are hugely important.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.