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.

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.

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

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

People buy products if they're better.

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

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.

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

I don't believe in brands.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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