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

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.

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.

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.

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.

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

There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.