One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.

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

One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.

An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

Anger is a good motivator.

Apartments are getting smaller on a whole. Houses are getting smaller. People don't need great big vacuums anymore.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

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

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.

China can and will be an invaluable trading partner to both the U.S. and the U.K.

China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.

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

Design and technology should be the subject where mathematical brainboxes and science whizzkids turn their bright ideas into useful products.

Designing aircraft and racing cars is an extremely exciting thing.

Don't listen to experts.

Emerging markets are hugely important.

Engineering is treated with disdain, on the whole. It's considered to be rather boring and irrelevant, yet neither of those is true.

Engineering undergraduates should not be charged fees. They should receive grants, not student loans, and the government will get the money back long-term from increased exports.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.

Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.

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

Far too few designers put any thought into usability, ending up with a great product that's completely inaccessible.

Fear is always a good motivator.

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

I don't believe in brands.

I don't design down to a price.

I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

I grew up running miles of the Norfolk coastline. I'd think nothing of a six-mile run before breakfast. I still run, though not as far and not before muesli.

I hate science fiction.

I like living on the edge.

I myself scraped seven poor passes at O-level.

I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you're going to do when you've got your degree.

I think people are realizing that engineering and science are extremely good degrees to get and you'll be very highly paid once you've got them.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

I want entrepreneurs to be engineers and scientists and designers; they don't necessarily have to be Internet entrepreneurs or retail entrepreneurs.

I was frustrated as a child when I had to use a vacuum. It had a screaming noise and the smell of stale dog and a lack of performance.

I'm afraid I am tidy, and I have to be because the office is open plan and my glass office door is literally always open.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.