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.