Transcript
Sir Martin Temple
Hello. Can we just ask you, inevitably, can we ask you quickly to have a coffee and come back? Thank you.
Can I ask Design Council people to herd people into the room, please? Bring them back in, please.
Can I just ask you to hurry in, everybody, please? Just move in quickly, please.
As the room has quietened somewhat, I’ll now start this session. I’ve been absolutely delighted to have been asked to chair the session on the role of design and innovation in manufacturing and also delighted to welcome our online audience, which is now actually joining us online and they’re watching us through this whole forum from now on.
And just to give you a sense of this, there are around 500 people listening to this online so a significant other audience. Now, over the last decade, one of the bodies that I chair, EF, the manufacturers’ organisation, has been tracking trends and developments in manufacturing. Now, many of you will know that manufacturing today is one of the brighter spots of the economic recovery.
As a nation we seem to have finally woken up to the importance of making things and having a better-balanced economy, though I think we all realise, lots still to be done and there are going to be some pretty tough times ahead. However, even before the recession, manufacturing was doing actually pretty well. In fact, on the eve of the credit crunch, EF saw record balances in our well-respected quarterly survey of manufacturing performance.
The reason for this success is fairly simple. Global competition has been intensified by the rise of the emerging economies and the continuing liberalisation of markets for industrialised goods. And as a result, many UK manufacturers have realised that they can no longer compete on cost alone. Many have therefore moved and transformed their competitive offering, choosing instead to focus on innovation, the development of new and often niche products and services. And a focus on design has, in many cases, been at the heart of this process.
And they’re now reaping the benefits of this transformation. No doubt our speakers this morning will talk about this in much more detail but design in manufacturing often uses tried and tested technologies and solutions and translates them into approaches, discussions and thinking. These nearly always provide more radical and more far-reaching solutions than companies would ever have imagined when they first started out.
As we’ve heard earlier, through design companies like Apple have been able to draw together innovation, technology and aesthetics to create world-class products and become market leaders. Through design, companies have been able to produce their products in a smarter way, allowing them to bring down input costs and reduce some of the disadvantages they face in comparison to their lower-cost-based competition and often gaining advantages in many other ways they hadn’t envisaged.
And through design, many companies have been able to accompany new products with a matching range of revenue-generating services. So design is already driving manufacturing growth but we can and should do more.
Design, for example, can help the UK unlock the value of its science and technology base by quickly turning new research into commercial reality and through design we have the opportunity to provide products that will satisfy the hunger for manufactured goods created by increased living standards in the developing world.
And design can also help us address some of the major challenges facing society, such as the aging population, climate change and the strain being placed on the earth’s natural resources. These are some of the opportunities and aspirations that we have but how do we make them a reality?
How do we embed the impulse of design in the DNA of an ever-widening range of companies? How do we ensure that we have a workforce which is alive to and qualified to deliver the benefits of design? And how do we actually become better at commercialising the UK’s great traditional strengths in innovation and design? And it’s a process we’ve struggled with for decades.
But actually, are we deluding ourselves that design can and should be a key component in a strategy for growth? Are our arguments and examples compelling enough? Is the value of design to manufacturing actually a figment of the design world’s imagination or can we really, can it really help to turn a good company into an outstanding one in such a competitive world?
Now, these are just some of the issues that we hope to address and get your views on over the course of the next hour. We’re going to have two short presentations followed not actually by the ideas section that we had but by Mark Priss, Minister of State for Business and Enterprise, and then we will have the ideas section after that.
And whether you like it or not, we are actually skipping the next coffee break because you used it all up last time, actually, and it clearly shows we can’t get you back in the room. So to begin our discussions therefore, let me introduce our guests. We have Ian Callum and Gerry McGovern from Jaguar Land Rover, a leading British brand, obviously well-known to you all, who’ll talk about how design inspired innovation and in so doing, secured growth and jobs.
They’ll be followed by Chris Saunders from Novatos [?] on how design helped to transform a UK technology firm. Clearly we’re under pressure on time. The judgement of me will not be the wisdom of this session but whether I get you back on time or not. So we have the question and answer session after that. I’ll hand over to, first of all, Gerry, who’s going to speak to you first of all. Thank you very much.