BIG POTATOES

In Doing it the German way (Guardian, 31 December) Jonathan Glancey argues that the British economy is built on flimsy and unreliable foundations and Britain should be making more things:

At its best, the making of things is an all-absorbing activity. It seems odd to have so many people in Britain making things purely as a hobby, when we might be earning our living making high-quality modern products every bit as desirable in their own way as bright new BMWs. The truth is, a consumer or service economy will never make us happy. It is time to curb the shopping, and the environmental destruction this involves, and to rescue ourselves economically, and in terms of wellbeing, through more of us making intelligent, useful and profitable things contentedly and well.

[Summary and shared bookmark]

Glancey is right to celebrate the increased UK interest in the culture and craft of making But he, and some of the respondents to his article, seem to consider our ‘consumer culture’ to be a choice. It isn’t. Britain was the first country to industrialise and is farthest along the industrial cycle – partly thanks to it not having faced bankruptcy and the complete destruction of its industry by war. A century ago it found a role as the global investor – and latterly a provider of services to other global investors – and it is thus more exposed to global economic developments.

The alternative Glancey imagines cannot be wished into existence. But we could significantly alter the balance of the British economy if we had political leadership that could think big and envision better futures, we took R&D seriously, accepted risk and tolerated failure, thought globally, and trusted ordinary people. The latter is a characteristic of BMW, which Glancey lauds. Any UK industrial policy needs to recognise that BMW’s products are more like mobile computers than cars, and that Britain should be inventing new forms of transportation more than aping past industrial success stories.

For his Battle of Ideas 2011 satellite event in Derby (The end is nigh: is survival all we can hope for?, on 11 October) James Woudhuysen wrote in the Independent Blogs about the modern day subsumption of everything to the Apocalypse and the lack of ambition of politicians:

In the 1980s [many thought everything] had to take second place to preventing [nuclear] Armageddon… Thirty years on, at Chris Huhne’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, it’s the same story: the survival of the Earth trumps all other arguments… the Coalition has put reduction in the demand for energy at the heart of its policy programme… consumers must be ‘engaged’ in their energy consumption… Rein back your profligate energy use if you want to avoid… the Apocalypse!… Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne [portrays] climate change as an already-established ‘disaster’… The Coalition has repeatedly postponed plans for growth… New Labour’s ‘Plan B’ for growth is even weaker on innovation than [Osborne's]… Labour has nothing to say about higher productivity in industry, construction, agriculture or services [and has] confirmed its desire to put Britain into suspended animation… politicians [can] think of nothing more ambitious than to maintain the status quo.

The end is nigh: is survival all we can hope for?, James Woudhuysen, Independent Blogs, 11 October 2011 [Shared bookmark]

Friday 30 September, Battle of Ideas Festival, Victoria & Albert Museum

James Woudhuysen will be speaking at the V&A Friday Late debate Idea factories? Manufacturing and making in the 21st century (one of the Battle of Ideas Festival Satellite Events) on Friday 30 September. There is no cost to attend the event. James notes:

In Britain, illusions about the creative economy die hard. Artistic creativity does not require the investments or the long-run budgets demanded by R&D in manufacturing, and especially in services. Britain’s designers and artists love to flatter themselves about their importance, and politicians are far too ready to reciprocate. The result is that the ‘creative’ potential of China is underestimated; the technological possibilities with Britain’s not-dead-yet manufacturing sector are forgotten, or exaggerated; and changes to behaviour rather than in technology are seen as the solution to backwardness in infrastructure, private services and public services. What creatives need to rally round is the cultural struggle for innovation that leads to more and better ’stuff’, more and better intangibles, and more and better science. These signs of progress are indivisible, whether they come from Shoreditch or Shanghai.

The chair and speakers are:

David Bowden, coordinator, UK Battle Satellites;
poetry editor, Culture Wars;
TV columnist, spiked
Sandy Black, professor of fashion & textile design & technology,
Centre for Sustainable Fashion, University of the Arts London;
author, Eco Chic: the fashion paradox

Daniel Charny, senior tutor, Royal College of Art;
director, From Now On;
curator, ‘Power of Making’, V&A

Dr Paul Reeves, principal software developer,
Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks R&D; former senior researcher,
International Automotive Research Centre, University of Warwick

Angela Saini, freelance science
journalist; author,
Geek Nation

James Woudhuysen, professor of forecasting and
innovation, De Montfort University; co-author,
Energise! A future for energy innovation

Matt Warman, new technology journalist,
Daily Telegraph

If you Tweet about the event please use the hashtag #battleofideas. You can also add the event to your calendar from the shared event page.

Friday 16 September, London Design Festival, Imperial College London

“We want the words: ‘Made in Britain, Created in Britain, Designed in Britain, Invented in Britain’ to drive our nation forward. A Britain carried aloft by the march of the makers” said Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in his 2011 Budget speech.

In his prime time BBC documentary Made in Britain Evan Davis argued that creativity and innovation is the life blood of the British economy and mapped future scenarios. We have created a globalised economy in which new materials and processes proliferate, products and services have merged, digital and analogue are a continuum, and R&D funding models are being fundamentally challenged. Yet, substantial and high quality manufacturing is still core to London and its hinterland – from Coca Cola to Ford Motors, tractor makers to manufacturers of electrical products – and many global companies choose London as their creative hub.

On Friday 16 September, as part of the London Design Festival, we have co-programmed and Nico Macdonald is chairing the debate Designed in Britain, Made in Britain with the Imperial College-RCA Design London programme. This debate takes place at Imperial College London.

Taking part are Bonnie Dean, Chief Executive of the Bristol & Bath Science Park and Chair of Economic Policy Committee, Engineers Employers Federation; Gus Desbarats, Chairman of TheAlloy: experience led design, National Chairman of British Design Innovation; Nick Leon, Director of Design London; Miles Parker, Managing Director of Linx Associates Ltd and co-founder of the Thames Gateway Manufacturing Alliance; and Kwickscreen founders Michael Korn and Denis Anscomb, a company incubated by Design London and recent winner of the UK leg of the James Dyson Award.

We will be asking whether the city is again becoming a viable site for manufacturing. Can we can re-design design to help London, and the UK, build on its manufacturing strengths? How can we better integrate design and manufacturing? Where can education and national and local government help? And we will be debating the credible design-manufacturing visions for London’s economic future which could influence strategy over the next 50 years.

Please see the event page for more information and to reserve your seat. [Shared event listing] Attendees will be Tweeting about the event using the Festival hashtag #ldf11.

More generally, people involved in the Big Potatoes Design workgroup will be taking part in London Design Festival events and debates and we will be flagging them on the event sharing service Lanyrd with the tag ‘ldf11′.

James Woudhuysen argues that the biopharmaceuticals giant Pfizer’s decision earlier this year to close the company’s labs in Sandwich, south-east England, exposed the Lib-Con coalition government’s lack of any strategy for growth. Analysing the trends in pharmaceutical research and societal attitudes to it over the last fifty years he argues that:

The agenda in society today is much more about nudging you to change your diet or your exercise than it is about having hopes that they will come up with wonder drugs. That agenda supplies the real, overarching and dominant context behind the drive, by big pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer, to get out of research.

Big Pharma, small ambition, James Woudhuysen, spiked, 21 February 2011

On the 50th anniversary of the first manned spaceflight, James Woudhuysen praises Gagarin’s daring – and says we need more of it today.

Read on at spiked

For all their talk of innovation, the Lib-Cons are more concerned with pinching pennies than investing.

The UK government’s 131-page The Plan for Growth, published with Chancellor George Osborne’s Budget speech last week, speaks of innovation no fewer than 86 times. Clearly the Coalition has become more exercised about innovation than New Labour ever was:

Yet for all the rhetoric about innovation in the Budget, both the official concept of it and the sums of money made available for it are very modest. Accountants wrote more of the Plan than did innovators: everywhere one can detect the dead hand of penny-pinchers in the Treasury. The narrative on innovation as it currently exists is a low-carbon one (58 mentions), drawn up by Vince Cable’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Theirs is a low-investment narrative, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that, in the 2000s, UK business investment as a share of GDP was one of the lowest in advanced economies.

Read on at spiked.

The Prime Minister’s recent proposal for an “east London tech city” (River Lea shapes up as Silicon Valley, Financial Times, November 4) connecting the Olympic Park and Shoreditch is really an information-technology-and-a-bit-of-greentech city. But ‘technology’ is much broader that this. Unfortunately most of it lacks the media cachet and public buy-in of Twitter, Facebook and Google.

And their significance is over-estimated. In reality these businesses – and only the latter really deserves that moniker – represent the tangible benefits of decades of hard research work, in corporations, universities, government labs and beyond which created the integrated circuits and networks, operating systems and software, drives and displays atop which they sit. Without more of this hard R&D work we won’t have a future legacy on which we can build such tangible innovations. But promotion of such fundamental research is absent from this warmed over plan from the Dotcom era.

Of course information and communication technology (ICT) will be a foundation of future economic activity and innovation. Rather than wooing the sexy ‘young insurgent companies’ the Prime Minster spoke about at the CBI conference [video], the Coalition would do better to promote investigation of the ways ICT can enable innovation in some un-sexy sectors, and how it might facilitate the creation of new products – and greater productivity – in the heavy, slow old industries of which Cameron seems so embarrassed.

Author: Martyn Perks

Now that many public sector bodies, charities and businesses are faced with the prospect of severe cutbacks in light of the government’s spending review, managers everywhere will be brainstorming to find their own ways of resolving the mess they’re in. However many of those tasked with conjuring up solutions to the mess will find it hard to break out of the constrained circumstances with any genuinely innovative ideas, especially if their only motive is to reduce waste, downsize and make cutbacks.

So is there any value in “blue-skies thinking”, which can open up new possibilities by ignoring limits and self-imposed constraints, especially in an era of austerity like now? Or is blue-skies thinking just a management cliché and an irresponsible indulgence?

Read on: Independent Blogs > Battle of Ideas

This article is promoting the debate “Blue-skies thinking is dead: long live blue-skies thinking?” at the Battle of Ideas festival on Sunday 31 October.

Two of the BIG POTATOES authors, Norman Lewis and James Woudhuysen, are taking part in the forthcoming Future City keynote debates, which are the core of the Mayor’s Story of London Festival and take place at the British Library Conference Centre 4–8 October. The Story of London Festival takes place 1–10 October and is on the theme ‘London, Innovation and the Future’, focusing on London as a site of innovation and the value of innovation to the future of the city.

Norman Lewis is taking part in the Future City debate Is London missing out on the potential of new technologies? on the evening of Thursday 7 October. The other speakers are Iain Gray, chief executive, Technology Strategy Board; Adam Hart-Davis, writer and broadcaster; Dr Hermann Hauser, co-founder, Amadeus Capital Partners; and Oliver Morton, Energy and Environment Editor, The Economist and author of Eating the Sun. The debate will be chaired by David Rowan, editor, Wired UK. (See event details below.)

James Woudhuysen is taking part in the Future City debate London and the future: Will we still be a major player in the world in 2050? on the evening of Friday 8 October. The other speakers are Professor Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London; Jude Kelly, artistic director, Southbank Centre; Julie Meyer, founder and chief executive, Ariadne Capital; and Peter York, social commentator, writer and broadcaster. The debate will be chaired by Simon Fanshawe, broadcaster and writer. (See event details below.)

Full information these debates follows. Other debates in the series are Bankers and Bonuses: What has the City ever done for London? on 4 October; Is London growing too big too fast?, 5 October; and London and the Olympics: Predicting the legacy of the twenty-first century on  6 October. Speakers and chairs include Billy Bragg; Luke Johnson, FT columnist and chairman of Risk Capital Partners; Economist editor-in-chief John Micklethwait; BBC Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason; Sir Terry Farrell; Chris Luebkeman, head of Foresight, Incubation and Innovation at Arup; James Heartfield; The Times design and architecture writer Stephen Bayley; and Ricky Burdett, head of the LSE Cities Programme.

We hope BIG POTATOES supporters will be able to take part in the Future City debates and discussions, which should be very engaging and offer a chance to develop many of the themes of the Manifesto in the context of the city and urbanism. Please also help us promote the debates in which we are taking part by sharing this post or re-Tweeting the announcement on our Twitter feed.

Future City: Is London missing out on the potential of new technologies? Thursday 7 October 2010 from 18:30 to 20:00 (British Library Conference Centre)

London has historically been the home of great innovations, and now the potential is even greater than ever with the development of digital technology. But can we recognise the real innovations hidden around us or are we distracted and dazzled by the short-term allure of shiny new technologies? Does London have the ambition and vision to use innovation to transform the city or will we stick with the status quo?

Event page and booking at the British Library Story of London page Future City: London and the future: Will we still be a major player in the world in 2050? Friday 8 October 2010 from 18:30 to 20:00 (British Library Conference Centre)

At the turn of the twentieth century, London was the largest and most influential city in the world. Now there are many other big players: Shanghai, Tokyo, New York to name a few. Are other cities doing better in developing education, arts and science? How will London’s ability to innovate fare in a time of spending cuts and increasing regulation? Will London get left behind or is there something special about it that will keep it racing ahead?

Event page and booking at the British Library Story of London page