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

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 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.

The media thinks that you have to make science sexy and concentrate on themes such as rivalry and the human issues.

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.

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.

Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.