INVENTOR Trevor Baylis was in Kent the other day talking about how Britain must get back to inventing, making and exporting.
And for once, the infectiously enthusiastic creator of the Freeplay wind-up radio, was not being original - it’s a familiar message.
But we’ve lost the plot; where old style Britain’s trading and business acumen paved the way for the inventions that sparked the industrial revolution, we have regressed to rely on asset appreciation and invisible financial export earnings.
Meanwhile, self-confessed eccentrics like Trevor Baylis have had to fight hard for funding and to keep control of their inventions.
But as Google boss Eric Schmidt – and there’s a company that knows a bit about invention – said last week, it’s time Britain and Europe started liking and nurturing ‘crazy entrepreneurs’ rather than money-making suits.
He asked: where are our equivalents to entrepreneurial and inventive stars like Apple’s Steve Jobs?
Having co-created the ground-breaking computer company, Jobs was famously sacked when it faltered and went off and helped turn Pixar into a successful film animation concern. Jobs then returned in triumph to Apple and banged out world-beaters including the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Far from wearing a suit, Jobs’ favoured work gear is a black turtle neck, battered jeans and ‘sneakers’.
And Microsoft creator and arch-rival Bill Gates might affect a more corporate image now, but still cannot help looking like the bespectacled computer geek and Harvard drop out whose fledgling company got its big break writing a PC operating system for IBM – then the colossus of computing – and ended up bossing the entire industry.
Where are our crazy entrepreneurs? OK, we have the ‘flambouffant’ Richard Branson whose ‘big thing’ now is trying to make space travel affordable - for the rich - and there is vacuum cleaner re-inventor James Dyson, but we need many and much more.
And there’s a terrible irony in all this. Just when we need genius to get the UK moving again, I keep hearing how hard it is to borrow money from banks hell-bent on rebuilding capital after the excesses of recent years; the Dragons’ Den crew can’t bridge the gap - their resources amount to small change in a national context.
As Google’s Mr Schmidt told a Daily Telegraph interviewer: “You've got to have the crazy entrepreneur types, who you've got to celebrate, which we do in America. And you've got to have the venture capital, which really is 'at risk' capital and is different from other capital.
"Jobs are created by the private sector not by the public sector. Wealth is created by the private sector not by the public sector. If you are going to have great companies you have to be willing to support and encourage the creation of real wealth-generating capitalists. That means you have to put up with them."
Steve Loader