Wired Business Conference: Inventing Sucks

[Music] [Music] [Music] to introduce James Dyson Sir James Dyson Knight of the realm and a consumate inventor who came out with the first Bagless cyclonic vacuum cleaner about 20 years ago and has since disrupted all sorts of other consumer electronics categories with the fan and the air blade which sounds like a 747 taking off um all amazing products so I thought we would just get started because the the product Cycles seem to be shortening and everyone expects you to come to Market with something very quickly these days and yet you spent two two decades possibly in your garage tinkering before you came up with your final prototype will you tell us a little bit about that well it wasn't two decays but it was five years oh well five years and I built sorry buil 5,127 prototypes I would say you know I'm I'm a huge failure because I did 5,126 mistakes but um no it took a long time and and things do I mean uh we're developing Battery Technology that won't be out for 15 years and our electric motors digital very high-speed electric motors they took 10 years before we got them to the market but you when it gets there instead of being like that and clunky it's tiny goes 110,000 RPM as against the 30,000 RPM it's twice as powerful and lasts almost forever so it you know it's a much much better product but it takes time and you have a big development teams doing it sure but there's nothing wrong with things taking time I agree amen so but when you did come out with this vacuum it was an incredibly disruptive technology I mean um you know we made a few en yeah I would imagine the the Hoovers of the world were not too pleased so what kind of resistance did you meet when you came out with it well the the retailers um sort of didn't understand it at first but when they did they were very supportive um the competition ignored it hoping we'd go away and gradually one by one they started copying it and you know we had the usual thing of having to sue them but um I'm not uh unfortunately cuz you you I mean uh in America you you you spend I think it's four times as much on um lawsuits as you do on research and development so it's not a good situation it's a Pity because uh you know Americans love technology so you know researching and developing technology is much more interesting than fighting lawsuits um but uh there it is um but you were really trying to solve a problem a common everyday problem which is that vacuums sucked up dirt and air and dust with bags and you removed that problem um do you see all design as a a matter of everyday problem solving well for me it is I mean I'm just an ordinary person I was a designer and I I went and trained as an engineer and um you know I get angry about things that don't work you know hand drivers I gone into Laboratories and washed my hands hands then I'd have gone on this endless paper towels which I think are a huge waste of paper towels and those hot air hand dryers you stand there for ages and then give up hands on your trousers and you walk so we got angry about that and we were messing around in the in the labs with another product that used a high-speed blade of air and we thought wouldn't this be the way you know to scrape water off your hands with a blade of air rather than using all that heat to try and evaporate the water and by the way chap your hands in the process right so um we came up with a technology it was made possible by again a high-speed digital motor uh there which again goes at 110,000 LPM and develops incredible pressure so we get pressure to come out of this three of a millimeter slot here and it creates it's literally like a windshield wiper it scrapes the water off your hands it's quite a nice feeling actually see the skin Rippling a bit yeah we uh yeah the torque of that thing is incredible I mean it's really is feels like a a race car well it saves a huge amount of energy you see it's one six of the energy of a hot air Hand Dry it's it's 12 seconds not 40 seconds and it's three times as environmentally friendly as hand tows so um we actually not the reason we did it we did it because we wanted to dry hands quickly but as it as it turns out it saves a lot of energy and and a lot of carbon footprint so then you didn't start out wanting to design a green product it just ended up being a byproduct of of the good engineer no we never do that I hate green wash and um the thing is I employ young Engineers I always try and get graduates and graduates are very idealistic and they've been taught lean engineering at college and I love lean engineering so what we do is lean engineering so our latest vacuum cleaners use far less plastic and a far lighter than the early ones which doesn't make them any flimsier because we do really really extensive testing trying to break them uh but it means they're lighter and use less energy to make them and less plastic uh and of course they're cheaper to make um so we can because of that we can put in more technology which we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do but you know that's what Engineers do they're not marketing people with greenwash they're Engineers doing lean engineering which they find exciting so let's talk about your engineering team then because now you are of course an international company and very well established you have how many people working for you uh nearly 4,000 4,000 people so how do you continue that Spirit of innovation disruption when you have 4,000 employees well I try to always employ graduates um because they have no fear they have no experience I don't want experience I want people who haven't done something before and want to find a new and better way of doing it and who have no fear of failure because failure is so important I mean it's what you you learn from it if you if you always succeed and always give the right answer you're learning nothing right so want people who feel as though they're pioneering and want to do something in a different and better way um and the funny thing is that these graduates and when they become managers and they want to employ someone they always want someone with experience and it's laziness it's because they think that the person coming in won't need to be trained won't need to be helped which is of course quite the reverse because you've got to knock their experience out in order to get them back to be thinking originally um and um graduates are good straight away you don't have to train grad they they're brilliant straight away I remember when I first started and I was making an upright vacuum cleaner most of the World by canister vacuum cleaner so I had to develop a canister vacuum cleaner but my few Engineers all five of them were busy on the existing product so so I just hired a graduate straight from the Royal College of Art where I came from and I said get on with it we're going to do you and I are going to do a cylinder back canister vacuum clean it together and that's and it's the one sitting in M by the way that one so that was a graduate did that so so how early graduate I mean graduate they these are they've gone through graduate school or they're just like fresh out of college fresh out of college fresh out of college yeah and you don't have to train them the worst thing to do is to train them just get them doing something and it's brilliant what they do I mean I don't have the ideas any longer they all have the ideas because they have no fear and no experience and uh and they're really enthusiastic and they want to change the world so you really encourage them to just feel their way into success product yes yes and I want to see their failures because that's what you learn from I would say if you if you um if you go to a golf club and you sort of look at it um you learn nothing if you break it over your knee you learn the strength of the golf club and what its yield point is so failure is terribly important it's terribly important in schools as well I mean the problem with schools is they only teach you to give the right answer and you're bright if you give the right answer quickly that they don't teach you to learn by experience or learn by failure and have no fear of failure there's very few jobs in life where you um know the answer before you do it right you have to work it out if you're an author or whatever you are you have to work it out so why don't we teach people at school to have failure and Learn by experience and um you have a foundation which is trying to encourage young people to get into engineering I know that there's a dir of Engineers coming into the Market in the UK there certainly is in the United States and you know meanwhile 40% of the graduates in Singapore are engineering graduates yeah and 30% in China yeah know we haven't got it here yet I mean the the problem with the global Marketplace is that um every everyone can make something a lot of people can make them cheaper than we can so to be successful we've got to develop something they haven't got that the world wants and which you can patent so the Chinese can't copy it so it's um R&D research development in employing Engineers is much more and scientists is much more important now than it ever was in the past and the shortage is going to be astronomic I mean we we have German companies like Seamans coming to poach our Engineers over to England to poach our Engineers the shortage in Europe and the United States is is a really serious problem and we can't go on as we did in the past producing Meo products products leg everybody else we've got to produce products that have far better technology and which everybody wants to buy so um and the problem is that you know 30% of of girls at school want to be models um and uh I was quite encouraged by the the figure of um 133% of girls wanted to become scientists till I learned that they all wanted to be pathologist because of the CSI program so the thing is we're not in schools we're not getting children to see the excitement and fun in engineering and in making things you know the the line is that manufacturing is repetitive and boring modern manufacturing is not repetitive I can assure you it goes wrong all the time and it's certainly not boring it's very exciting because you're having to introduce Automation and all sorts of exciting things and and you're making things all day long and what be more creative than that so is there a lot of tinkering and making happening kind of out in the open air at Dyson HQ ah yes I mean well we have uh 2,000 engineers and um we don't have too many projects we don't we try to concentrate on projects uh but you know we're not going to produce a product like anybody else's or one which only has a marginal Improvement we want a big Improvement if you have a big Improvement then we can go and sell it in Japan at Japan which is the second largest market and over here because you love technology here um and we can charge a lot for it and then make a lot of money and that's important there's no point in doing a business if it's not going to make a lot of money so let's talk about some of the other toys on the stage here because really with every product release you disrupt another industry and you know this is the fan which well I've had to sort of streak out and stop my grandchildren shoving their fingers through the the grill in a fan this blade spinning around at high speed really dangerous and a friend of ours had their finger chopped off your daughter had their finger chopped off and also impossible to clean and also the the blades chop the air and you get this sort of buffeting sounds like esoteric but it's actually true if you have it playing on you for an hour so this is I don't if I can switch it on um there we go so there it go you feel that what there it is um the it it takes in a very small amount of air here in a compressor and pumps it out through 1 mm anulus around here and that creates a negative pressure over this a for Section which sucks in air from behind and then it expands slightly and therefore creates more negative pressure so you've got a huge suction here and then you get something called viscous sharing here so you end up multiplying this original air flow about 20 times so you get something for nothing just by having a few interesting shapes I feel like I'm talking to someone at Boeing or something it's as if you are creating an airplane well it is a little bit like an airplane yeah in a very modest way and tell us um about this is the heater this is the heater yeah we we um which uses the same principle um but has uh bare and titanate uh semiconductors in here which are not as hot as uh resistance were you know that when when you fit um turn fan heaters on you get that smell of burning dust right um because the resistance wire is quite high temperature this is much lower temperature and so you don't get a burning smell um and of course you can touch the heater um so uh you know it's um it's got very it's very IT projects the air the the hot air very well so it Heats a room up quicker than a normal fan heater and uses slightly less electricity and then the the well we talked a bit about the air blade yes and now all of the new vacuums are working on this ball technology yeah cuz I mean AI thought vacuum cleaners were heavy and they because they've got four wheels uh they're difficult to steer because you keep having to go backwards and forwards and then sort of do that to get round something so we just put the the motor and all the workings down in the ball so it's got a very low center of gravity and then you just twist it and go around things like that so that's great it's just dead easy to use and as I said very very very light yeah indeed um so are you excited about some of the new Ena do you want know how to empty it I didn't tell you how to empty it of course you take you take the bin off and then just empty it like that yeah I I do have one of these so that and you use the hose do to to get into small places right that's the best the best I I clearly need to upgrade my Dyson because that you did that with much more facility than I do it at home good good so we made some improvement yes indeed um so there are all these exciting new technologies of course that are enabling rapid prototyping like 3D printers um do you use any of that technology at all oh well of course and uh actually nothing beats going out and making a working prototype of something which isn't necessarily a complete product it might be a part of something so we don't really use rapid prototyping for that but the m and the trouble is that people tend to use rapid prototyping to a sort of immediate um uh example of what they've designed on the screen and that's not very good but what it's really useful for is doing lots and lots of prototypes which you can go out into real homes and test and put onto user courses and put through mechanical test systems so it's really useful for that and enormously time saving and if you were to choose another consumer product that really frustrates you now what would it be well I'm not going to tell you oh come on that would be a giveaway but I mean almost everything is frustrating when you think about it and anger is a great motivator indeed indeed um so tell us a little bit we you just quickly broached the idea of China uh moving into the market place and uh that you have several lawsuits going what what has been your experience expanding into that market well we don't sell there at the moment we we probably will um but uh we used to manufacture something some things there but we we pulled it out it's a great market and I I think it I mean the trouble is they don't buy vacuum cleaners because they have a servant who um sweeps the floor um and they tend to buy Buras and bent which they can show off so it's not at the moment it's not a great Market but it will be it will be and we are going in there but there's many other actually more interesting Southeast Asian markets for us like Japan which is a wonderful Market where they love technology and they very sophisticated and Taiwan and Singapore and Malaysia these are are great markets as well China isn't the only Market there mhm but but you clearly are protecting your patents and intellectual property is important to you as a product designer and we talked a little bit before about open-source design and you know there's a movement towards that which is kind of counter to intellectual property and and how do you feel about this new movement of Open Source design where people are collaborating on mass on you know erating new uh new developments and product design and yet you know you really do have to protect your patent in your intellectual property if you have um something that is is radically redesigning a product well I think that patents encourage competition if you didn't have patents and you couldn't protect what you did no one would develop anything there won't be any point because if you can develop something and someone copies it you're not going to you're going to lose money CU they haven't had the development costs or for that matter the patent costs they just copy it and you know they've had no costs so you've got to have patents to create competition so if I do something and patent it someone else has to create something else to compete with mine and they patent it and we're in competition mhm so uh some people suggest that that patents restrict competition I think it's exactly the reverse interesting um so and then let's let's Circle back then again to how what the what your foundation is doing to encourage young designers and young Engineers I know you have a pilot program in Chicago yeah we we're doing after school clubs to teach them design and technology so we go them vacuum cleaners to take the bits and put them back together again and then they can make their own projects um and I've seen them do this and is wonderful I mean in one hour a group of three children did a device to mince up kitchen waste and blow it outside into a bin because they hated the smelly bin with a food rotting away in it you know they got angry about a problem and found a solution to it these are 11y old kids it's great to see that it's amazing and in the the after school clubs there was one boy who was absolutely hellbent on being a lawyer but now he wants to be an engineer you got him we got him we've got him only one but it's a start that's great that's great um well you know I I I really want to hear a little bit more about how you you um what your prototyping process is like and how you um train your young Engineers to not only accept failure but to be real risk-takers um I know that we we spoke a little bit about how when you started out it was impossible to get any money from Venture capitalists because they were afraid of product and so I mean the good thing is is that now you call the shots own the company but you know that that's a tough process and um and you know you have always really encouraged risk-taking can you talk a little bit about that yeah well it's incredibly important um yes when I when I started I went to venture capitalist to try and raise money and they said uh well the vacuum cleaner looks quite interesting but we're not investing in you because you're an engineer um anyway there's Mr Honda and AIO marit as examples of people have been reasonably Successful by by being Engineers um but uh um no I think I think the the uh of course bringing out new products is a risk it's a huge risk and it it isn't just the development cost it's the tooling costs the plant and Equipment costs the launch costs enormous amount of money but um it's exciting it's fun and if you don't do it it's very dull and also if you don't do it people catch up so it's absolutely essential to do it and there are businesses that make their money by copying people and then there are businesses that that try to make a living by creating things and you know I know which Camp I'd like to be in and Engineers want to be you know particularly young Engineers want to be inventive they really want to change things and do things differently and it's you know it's not very hard to get them to do it I me just allow them to make mistakes and when they have an idea you're sitting around and talking about something they have an idea you just say well go and make it go and try it it won't work but go and try it no it will work eventually but it don't be disappointed if it doesn't work the first time right find out what went wrong and then work out ways to overcome it so it's allowing people to make silly mistakes to make silly suggestions um obtuse suggestions and not laugh at them just say yeah that sounds interesting go and do it but the worst of L suggestions are the correct suggestions the sort of obvious suggestions they're just irritating you you've got what we want is people to make um you know very obtuse and different ways of doing things mhh so what other companies do you admire who who else is is taking risks right now well I you know I don't I'm so busy doing what I'm doing I don't really look around what other people are doing but you know I'm sure other people are doing wonderful things I'm keeping myself rather busy doing this clearly clearly uh well thank you so much for being here I think we'll take some questions from the audience and from our Twitter stream um have a question here in front of me does product make the brand or does brand make the product well there's only one word I banned in my company and that's the word brand I don't believe in it at all you're only as good as the product you're making uh people buy our product they don't buy our brand they don't buy our company they're not interested in our company they buy our product and we're only as good as our latest product so I don't believe in brand at all [Music] sorry M Mr Dyson my name is Patrick Birmingham graduate of St Martin's School of Fine Art what did you learn at art college that still informs or influences the decisions you make today well that's a very good question I I went to a wonderful College called The Royal College of Art in London um which it's called The Royal College of Art but actually most of it is design uh and I learned about design and um you know design College you can you can dream you can build a product that you really like and and have experts help you you can go over to Imperial College famous science College next door and get help and uh so actually the best thing it did was to tell me that it's no good just being a designer slightly negative thing actually it's no good just being a designer you've got to make a product that works better so I went off to an engineering company for seven years to learn how to do research and development but I'd never have got there if it hadn't been for this college telling me about design and getting me to well a dream and be ambitious but also teaching me how to design things thank you hi um Barry rolz rolz Capital Management I I love the clever application of engineering and the smart ways you apply physics but I'm just curious about the day of James Dyson do you walk walk through life seeing all sorts of just terribly designed products and Machinery like is your life just what is this piece of garbage that you're constantly interacting with well I'm delighted to meet a venture capitalist interested in engineering and science I think you're the first one I've met but um uh well you know I think all Engineers do that you go around and uh you know you want to know how something works and if if it isn't very satisfactory it displeases you and it's actually it's it's in op AAL you know there's an opportunity to do something better why didn't they do this so Engineers just do that naturally I think like I presume doctors do when they see someone ill you know so uh and it's fun but it's yes it is annoying sometimes when you see you something badly designed actually there's an interesting thing about design is design think everybody thinks design is about how something looks um so you know when you think of design you think of someone in a pink shirt with a felt tip pens then when something doesn't work you kick it and you say who on Earth designed this so and the latter form is really what a designer is he's someone who not only makes things look good and last a long time and be of high quality but also make you know uses new technology to make them work better uh we have a Twitter question how much of your time is spent managing versus investing uh well I don't well no I say I don't invest but um uh I just want to do new products I often don't wonder about how much they cost we just do them because someone does tell me how much they cost um but I I don't manage at all because I'm a hopeless manager um so other people do the what's called managing um and I go and be with my engineers and uh just get involved in designing developing new new technology and new products so I'm lucky enough to got to the point in the business where I don't have to manage any anybody oh that's great which is wonderful I don't think I ever did anyway actually I mean I just we just got on with things maybe one last question anyone thank you uh Frank Gibney uh you you talk about uh being an and you are an engineer a wonderful engineer but uh you went to the Royal College of Art what uh is the difference between artists and engineers years and yeah that's it well not a lot um they're both you know trying to create something different um yes it's Ro it Royal College of Art and Design and I I actually studied architecture but um not a lot I think the same sort of sorry I don't know where you is that you there it's up on the balcony there I'd quite like to face the person who ask me the question there you go um uh I think um a designer or an artist is probably more interested in how something looks and the reaction you get um when you look at what you're looking at whereas an engineer is much more concerned probably with what goes on inside and the technology being used and how reliable it is and how long it lasts and how much it costs so uh I think for me I mean I I couldn't be an artist because I I need all those other complex issues to worry about I couldn't just worry about how some thing looks but I mean that's how you're made up I mean David hawne is brilliant and articulate and he he Paints the most wonderfully invented paintings uh but I just worked out what made me tick and what turned me on and it was engineering for me and developing technology well we're glad you went that way thanks so [Applause] much

Channel: WIRED

Views: 40,817

Keywords: BizCon2012, Library, 2012, wired business, PTN, disruptive by design, wired, interviews, Wired Business Conference, business

Id: akKoWePxYPU

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 28 2012