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.

All our engineers are designers and all our designers are engineers.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

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

Britain's great strength is its innovative, design and engineering natural ability and we're not using it.

Having a good idea is one thing, but persuading other people to buy it is quite another. Good inventors are polymaths: they think with their hands and their brains. They're experts in design, engineering and business.

Exactly 5,126 attempts to make the first bagless vacuum cleaner were failures-some catastrophic disappointments, some minor defects. It took 15 years. Prototype 5,127 was the success ... Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else.