Today, computers are almost second nature to most of us.

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.

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

Fear is always a good motivator.

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

If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.

If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.