Copyright 2001 Telegraph Group Limited

HEADLINE: Where have all our inventors gone? Once the most inventive of nations, Britain's status is declining. James Dyson says we must stop the rot before it's too late

BYLINE: BY JAMES DYSON

We are frequently told that Britain is the home of innovation, a hotbed of creativity that has spawned more inventions than any other modern country. Certainly that might have been true once, but as someone with first-hand experience of developing products in Britain, I fear that we have strangled the life from the research and development culture we once had.

As a nation of inventors, we have a lot to be proud of: for 200 years we dominated invention, science and manufacturing like no other country before or possibly since. From Newcomen, Watt and Savery's development of the steam engine in the early 18th century to Fleming's invention in 1904 of the vacuum diode, Britain ruled each successive wave of technology.

Last year I collaborated with The Daily Telegraph on a six-part series, James Dyson's History of Great Inventions, which was recently published as a book. Two of its six chapters are almost completely dominated by British inventions. It's a compelling testament to how, for a crucial period, we got it absolutely right.

The steam engine and locomotive, the spinning jenny, the telephone, photography, moving pictures, Harrison's timekeeper, the torpedo, traffic lights, vaccination, anaesthesia, synthetic dyes, Faraday's dynamo, the steam turbine, the fuel cell, postage stamp, mechanical computer, fax machine, vulcanised rubber - the list of great British inventions goes on and on.

Behind all these inventions are wonderful, fascinating tales of human ingenuity, cunning and determination. But, above all, these inventions all came about in Britain because the conditions at the time were absolutely right. Politics, economics, education, the industrial and commercial climate, and plain expediency made them possible.

Unfortunately, it has been a long time since that was the case.

Once the masters of invention, we are slipping into the second league. Last year, the United Kingdom filed 24,570 patents. It put us in fourth place behind Germany, America and Japan.

To be in fourth place internationally might sound respectable, but the statistics hide the facts: among the top 10, we are one of the few nations filing fewer patents with each passing year (see panel). And the decline is not slight. Since 1998, the number of British patent applications has almost halved.

Looking at patent applications per capita - probably the best measure of a nation's inventiveness - the picture is even worse: Britain is in seventh place, behind Luxembourg and only just ahead of Austria, Switzerland and Monaco. I'd be tempted to ask you to name a famous Monegasque or Luxembourger inventor, if it didn't highlight our sorry state of affairs.

So where did it all go wrong for the nation that fathered the iterative R&D process?

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel wanted the Great Britain to be the first propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic, he repeatedly tested and tweaked a propeller-powered launch on the Solent until the screw's design was just right. That taught British industry the value of R&D, a lesson that now seems forgotten, according to the R&D 2001 Scoreboard, recently published by the innovation unit at the Department of Trade and Industry.

The scoreboard compares the percentage of revenue spent on research by Britain's 500 largest companies with their counterparts abroad.

We spend 2.1 per cent of turnover, exactly half the international average, it says.

'The UK has an unusually large proportion of its R&D in pharmaceuticals and an unusually large percentage of sales in oil and gas,' it adds. 'If these sectors are excluded, the UK average intensity is 1.9 per cent, compared to an international average of 4.3 per cent on the same basis.'

Its message is simple: invest in R&D and you will be rewarded with innovation and invention. That's why at Dyson we invest 17 per cent of our turnover in R&D.

It is so obvious that the DTI innovation unit goes on to make the point in its report: 'Sales growth is greater for high R&D intensity companies and six times greater for companies with a higher proportion of sales from new products.' You couldn't say it plainer than that.

America, second in the patents league, gives companies 40 per cent additional tax relief for R&D expenditure. And in Japan, the league champion, interest rates have been around one per cent for decades.

No wonder they invest twice as much every year as British companies. If we want to kickstart investment, we also need the low interest rates and tax incentives.

But it's not just in commerce that the conditions are not right for invention and innovation. In academia, too, the rot is well advanced.

Successive governments have underinvested in R&D for decades. Now, the Government invests 17 per cent less in R&D (in real terms) than was invested in 1983. And when Britain fell from fourth to eighth in the global competitiveness league, the World Competitiveness Forum said reluctance to invest in R&D was a contributory factor.

Universities have long been complaining that cuts in their funding mean that students receive inadequate training in laboratory and workshop work, making them less attractive to industry and sending our brightest brains scurrying abroad.

And surely it is no coincidence that our inability to cope well with a succession of food scares - BSE, salmonella, listeria, E.coli, GM, swine fever and foot and mouth - came at a time when the agricultural research budget was being cut by up to 15.7 per cent a year.

We now live in a commercial culture that in many ways is counterproductive to invention. The first thing I teach new engineering and design recruits is that they will learn more from failure than from success. Failure is exciting. It leads to new ideas. And it teaches the process of discovery by making single, small changes. Unfortunately, that spirit requires long-term investment and does not square with an ethos that wants immediate results.

But I suspect that some of the reasons for our declining inventiveness are more deep-seated. When I was at school, the teachers used to scold the lazy pupils with warnings that they would 'end up in a factory'. The brightest pupils, it was assumed, would go into the Foreign Office and the professions, while the dunces would be condemned to a life sweeping the workshop floor.

Nobody enthused about how exciting and creative researching, developing and designing products could be. Maybe that's why Margaret Beckett and Betty Boothroyd seem reluctant to mention their engineering apprenticeships and why Margaret Thatcher kept her science background so quiet.

We live in a culture where the adman can charge a fortune for making nothing but a short-term sales gain and an engineer or manufacturer is paid much less for making things that build our long-term wealth. It cannot be right and it does not send out the right messages to schoolchildren and students. It has created a culture in which effortless brilliance, like the Oxford double first, is more admired than the dogged determined worker.

To say someone has a strong work ethic has become a term of insult in this country. But when I took my first vacuum cleaner to Japan, I was amazed at their attitude. They wanted to take time and effort getting the product absolutely right - no matter what the cost. For them, long-term success was more important than instant wealth.

Maybe we believe in shortcuts and fast results because our empire allowed us to become a nation of plunderers and exploiters, rather than developers and workers. Maybe that is why we are thinkers, not doers, and that is why we have become intellectually cynical, looking for reasons why something will fail, rather than hoping it will succeed. Think of the jeering that Clive Sinclair's C5 electric vehicle attracted when it failed. Fair enough, he misjudged the market quite spectacularly, but it seems wrong that his one failure instead of his successes has become his unfortunate legacy.

All these factors have conspired to make Britain a difficult place for an inventor. But I think the tide might be about to turn.

One of the most promising developments has been the introduction of design and technology into the national curriculum. It is now the most popular subject in schools. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who made the subject compulsory in 1987, we are creating a generation of makers and technical thinkers. These children have been taught to make working prototypes before they design the product, and there is anecdotal evidence that this is leading to better engineers graduating from university.

If we can relearn the lesson that investment in R&D is the best route to future wealth - after all, the landed gentry in the 18th century made their huge fortunes from investing in industry - then maybe we can hope for a new flowering of British inventiveness. And maybe, one day soon, a new generation of names will line up alongside John Harrison, Michael Faraday, Alan Turing, Frank Whittle and Christopher Cockerell, the father of the hovercraft who died believing everything was stacked against inventors.

But for the 'silly chaps', he once said, we would still be living in the Stone Age.

Edited by Telegraph Technology Correspondent Robert Uhlig, and illustrated on every page, James Dyson's History of Great Inventions ( pounds 17.99, Constable Robinson) is available for pounds 17.99 post-free in the UK. To order, please call 0870 155 7222 or write to Telegraph Books Direct, Units 5 & 6, Industrial Estate, Brecon, Powys LD3 8LA. and hear him

To mark the publication of the book, James Dyson and Robert Uhlig will be presenting a lecture, Serendipity, Coincidence or Accident? How Inventions Changed the World We Live In, at the Royal Society of Arts, John Adam Street, London WC2 at 6.30pm on Weds Dec 5. Tickets are pounds 5 each from 08708 303 434. Calls will be charged at the national rate.
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