07 Nov 2006
Speech by Dick Olver, Chairman, BAE Systems
The Leathersellers Lecture
City University, London
7 November 2006
Thank you for asking me to talk to you today. It's a great honour to be asked back to one's own university. I had some great times here and I learned principles about engineering which I still apply today.
I also want to thank the Leathersellers Company for their support for this event. Yours is a distinguished company which has a continuing influence today in areas such as research and technical education. For centuries, your work has been an example of applying intellectual skill to achieve excellence in the physical world. And in that, it resembles the subject I want to cover today, that of engineering.
And as yours is a long-established organisation, it seems appropriate to start with a little history. Let me take you back two hundred years to the moonlit streets of Birmingham - in the heart of England. If you were out on a full moon at that place and time you might well have encountered one the members of the Lunar Society en route to a meeting.
The Lunar Society met on the full moon, not because they were werewolves, but because the light made walking at night easier and safer. They did however recognise themselves to be a little out of the ordinary and cheerfully referred to themselves as 'lunatics'.
But they were in fact an exceptionally talented and special group. They included some of the central figures in the industrial revolution and they met in one form or another every month from 1765 to 1813.
The members included James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, Matthew Boulton, who commercialized the steam engine, Joseph Priestley who discovered oxygen and James Keir who facilitated the mass production of soap. At some meetings they would write or hear letters from their American friends Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
As you can see they were a mixed, cross-disciplinary group who learned from each other. This was a time when Birmingham was buzzing with innovation and enterprise. It was, if you like, the Silicon Valley of its day. Of course Birmingham in the late 18th and early 19th century was not the only place and time where innovation in engineering flourished and helped to change the world.
Later in the 19th century, in the West Country, Brunel created bridges, ships and aqueducts. Locals watched in fascination as he personally surveyed every stretch of the London-Bristol line with a walking stick that telescoped to 7 feet and a quarter inch - the precise width of the rail tracks.
Fast forward 100 years and the entire world was spellbound by the Apollo programme which not only achieved its goal of putting a human on the moon, but led to numerous spin offs for microelectronics, avionics and other branches of engineering. It demonstrated what can be achieved when people are captivated by an inspiring challenge.
At the time of Lunar Society, Britain was the workshop of the world, turning out engineering inventions and new business models.
Priestley wrote that he felt privileged to be "living in an age of miracles in which anything could be achieved."
What would he have said had he known that within a few generations, people would walk on the moon that lit his way home? I guess he would have thought he was in a new age of even greater miracles.
Yet - with all the achievements of the last century - does it feel like an age of miracles today? There was magic in engineering 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 200 years ago. But is there magic today?
In some places perhaps, but not everywhere. And tonight I want to ask where the magic has gone and how we can bring it back.
Specifically, I want to look at three things. As an engineer I like to see a structure and the three-legged stool is a pretty robust one!
So
- First I'll look at why engineers are needed
- Second I'll talk about the rewards that engineering can bring to individuals
- And third I'll discuss what can be done to encourage more people to become engineers - how we can recapture the magic.
Firstly, the need for engineering.
Obviously some people - your speaker among them - remain very enthusiastic about engineering. But the data suggests that the same cannot be said for everyone, at least in the UK.
In the UK this year applications to study electronic and electrical engineering at university were down by 17% and applications for mechanical engineering down 6%. By and large the numbers of people taking all forms of degrees in engineering in the UK has been fairly flat over the past decade.
But it hasn't been flat everywhere. The challenge for the industrialised economies such as the US and UK is that while the magic may have faded here, the emerging economies are experiencing their age of miracles right now - and young people are flocking to become engineers and make their mark.
Reliable and comparable statistics are notoriously hard to come by but figures from the US National Science Foundation for example, indicate that while just over 100,000 North American and 350,000 European students took their first degrees in science and engineering. In 2002, in Asia the total was more like 600,000 - more than North America and Europe combined. And the gap may be widening. One astonishing number reported recently by Business Week and the Washington Post was that almost half a million new students enrolled in four year engineering courses last year in India alone.
And this dichotomy is symptomatic of a wider cultural divide. The US Congress, for example, has a handful of engineers and over 200 lawyers - but of the Chinese Politburo of nine, how many are trained engineers? answer, nine.
Yet the comparative dearth of engineers in the West is happening at a time when engineering skills are needed more than ever.
I believe that engineering is fundamental to a country's competitiveness. It is also fundamental to human progress worldwide and therefore to any country which wishes to make a serious contribution to human progress. Engineers have been the drivers of change - from the wheel to the world-wide web. And today engineers are essential if the world is going to overcome problems such as global warming, terrorism, poverty and disease.
Any country that undervalues its engineers is effectively undermining its prosperity and relinquishing its ability to make a contribution to human progress.
Today, global companies headquartered in the west are sending work east to where it can be done not only economically but enthusiastically - GE in Bangalore, Microsoft in Beijing, Boeing in Moscow, Airbus in Tianjin.
The danger for western economies is that the engineering skill level of the off-shored work will rise and rise until only very high level R&D remains at home - if that. The steel industry is moving east. China is making 70% of the world's photocopiers at five per cent of the UK's wage rates. If industries and skills are to be retained, then they need to be supported and encouraged.
Countries - like companies - need to decide what is core and what is non-core - what can be outsourced and what needs to be retained in house. And I would argue that the decision on what is core revolves around security - economic security, national security and also energy security.
For economic security - or competitiveness - engineering is vital in order to maintain innovation, R&D and highly skilled areas of manufacturing. All of these enable countries to develop their Unique Selling Propositions - Korea's electronics, the UK's pharmaceuticals and aerospace, Germany's autos. They provide the added value that countries must pursue if they cannot compete simply on cost. The innovative aspects of engineering are reflected in levels of business R&D investment and here there is a clear premier league.
Companies from just five countries - the US, Japan, Germany, France and the UK - between them carry out 82% of the R&D performed by all companies globally, according to the DTI's R&D scorecard published last week. It also showed incidentally that the aerospace and defence sector was growing R&D faster than any other major sector worldwide.
National security dictates that a certain level of indigenous defence engineering capability is required in order to maintain sovereignty. Clearly we operate in a global defence industry today and conflicts are frequently undertaken by coalitions, but countries again need to decide on what is core. Currently, for example, my company is highlighting the need to sustain the UK's capability in making nuclear powered submarines, which is dependent on maintaining a complex range of unique skills here in the UK.
Energy security is a slightly different issue. Countries want to reduce dependence on imported oil and therefore are looking to increase their home-grown energy capacity, often through using renewable sources such as wind, solar and biofuels. Making advances in these technologies is very much the province of engineers.
And this takes me to the wider reason for promoting and encouraging engineering - namely its role in human progress.
In the 20th century, engineers brought the world mains electricity, affordable cars, aeroplanes, radio, television, computers, spacecraft, lasers and the internet. Medical and engineering advances helped increase average life expectancy by about 20 years worldwide.
Today we face a new generation of challenges - and again, engineering - along with computing and other sciences - is absolutely central to their resolution.
For example, climate change is one of the highest profile issues of our time. We saw the strength of popular concern here in London on Saturday.
And the solution to climate change is not only political. As I mentioned just now, it is technological. The dilemma that the world faces is that the forms of energy that are the cheapest are also the ones that emit the most carbon.
Coal, with its high carbon content, is cheap and plentiful in China, India and the US - and some projections suggest that over the next 25 years a new coal fired power station will go into operation every 60 hours.
At the same time the technologies that are lighter in carbon - solar, wind, biofuels, hydrogen - are more expensive.
Take hydrogen for example. It can be used to generate electricity in a power station or a vehicle fuel cell. And its only by-product is water. But hydrogen has to be made from something else. The simplest way is to burn gas - but that means carbon emissions. Hydrogen has to be stored, and it has to be distributed - hydrogen fuel would require a new infrastructure of fuelling stations. Imagine being the engineer to crack one of those issues.
Hybrid cars are a brilliant idea because they recycle the energy used in braking into electricity, resulting in a mix of electric power and liquid fuel. Companies such as Toyota and Nissan have taken a lead but hybrids are still relatively expensive. Who will be the new Henry Ford to create the classic, economical hybrid? Will it be a he or a she? Will she or he be Japanese, American, Russian? British?
Then think of the engineering challenges involved in addressing the problems of poverty and disease in the developing world. Around 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. In this area, the tasks include disinfecting water, improving infrastructure and providing access to power.
Engineering also has a huge part to play in combating terrorism - protecting civilians and the military against an increasing range of threats.
These are difficult challenges. They are the kinds of challenges that engineers spend long nights in laboratories exploring. They are the kind of challenges that require test after test, trial after trial, with many failures before a success comes along.
Yet I believe engineers will overcome these challenges - and those engineers will genuinely change the world.
As well as the individual challenge, there is a challenge to the UK - or any country - the challenge of being the source of ground-breaking new technologies and ideas.
Imagine a UK which leads the world - as it did 200 years ago - in turning out the key innovations that drive progress in economies and societies worldwide.
2. The value of engineering
And this takes us onto the second point - what does engineering offer to individuals? I have two points to make here. First, there is personal fulfilment and the satisfaction of a job well done. Second, there are many types of material rewards and the potential to reach positions of responsibility.
In terms of fulfilment, imagine the satisfaction that comes with knowing that you have made a major difference to society.
Think for example of Sir Peter Mansfield, who stood at this lectern last year. In 2003, he won a Nobel Prize for his work in transforming magnetic resonance imaging from the analysis of chemical structures to the development of a life-saving technique.
Equally interesting, and known to some of you here, is the story of Douglas Anderson from Dunfermline whose story of innovation began when opticians failed to spot the onset of a detached retina in his son Leif. Spurred into action, Anderson created a retinal imaging device that can detect diabetes, glaucoma, hypertension and certain cancers. His company Optos has commercialised the product and 2,000 of the devices are installed in clinics around the UK. This year Optos won the Royal Academy of engineering's MacRobert award.
In our own company we have people who are poised to make a decisive contribution to the fight against terrorism. They are working on an electronics countermeasures system called JETEYE to protect commercial airplanes against shoulder-launched rockets. The system uses infrared technology and is based on a product developed for the military. It's now been tested on a Boeing 767 for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
And looking at the challenge of development, have you heard of the work of Engineers without Borders - an equivalent of Medicines Sans Frontieres? Their members include engineers from all over the world who are involved in helping developing countries with projects in areas such as water supply, sanitation, food production, refugee camp planning, housing and transport. Have a look at their website - it's truly inspiring.
And no list of this kind is complete without James Dyson, the inventor of the bag-less vacuum cleaner and someone who has a real passion for engineering. I want to log a few thoughts about Dyson which I'll return to in a moment because they are very relevant. First he didn't start as an engineer but as an artist and designer. He worked with the Conran Design Group to design the Chrome seating for Terminal 1 at Heathrow. Second he spent no less than five years designing his cleaner. In all, he created 5127 prototypes. His company now has revenues approaching half a billion pounds and profit of over one hundred million pounds.
James Dyson has become a very effective ambassador for engineering and he is giving something back to the profession through the James Dyson Foundation which supports educational institutions. At the James Dyson School in Bath, due to open in two years time, over 2,000 young people will experience the type of cutting edge technology normally only seen in industrial R&D centres.
That takes me to point two about the rewards of engineering. For while it is true - regrettably true - that engineering doesn't command the salaries of merchant banking or management consultancy - it is far from a dead-end. Engineers can not only go on to become millionaire entrepreneurs like Dyson but also business leaders.
A survey two years ago found that 16 of the top executives in the FTSE-100 were engineers - just one fewer than the number of accountants in the same positions. Another survey found that over 80 of the FTSE-100 companies had at least one engineer on their main board. I'm one of a number of engineers who has subsequently found their way into business leadership. It's important to have engineers in senior positions in companies because they understand the challenges being faced in the operational and research areas and appreciate the need to innovate continually.
Lord Sainsbury tells a story about highly skilled physicists at the CERN laboratory in Geneva whom he asked about their next career move. They told him they all had offers from banks and financial institutions in the City of London - why? Because the city values the high level analytical skills acquired by a top-level engineer.
So while engineers may start their working lives on a considerably lower salary than a banker or lawyer, they may well have options to move up into management or across into other fields, using their engineering experience.
So onto my third point.
How can we encourage more people into engineering?
I've already implicitly covered one way to do this - which is to hold up examples of successful engineers as role models to follow. It needs to dawn on young people that it can be exciting and even 'cool' to be an engineer.
But what other means can be used to encourage people into engineering?
My view is that we have to go back to where I started - the magic of engineering. It's too easy for those of us who are engineers to suppress our enthusiasm and end up presenting the world with rather a dry view of what engineering is about.
So we need to concentrate on the inspiring dimension of engineering - the stuff that gets us up in the morning.
And it has to start at school. At BAE Systems we try to play our part by spending around £7m a year on support for education and young people. In the UK, that includes road-shows that visit around 135 schools a year. The children see a theatre performance and are challenged to design a vehicle that can travel by land, sea and air.
At the other end of the spectrum of education, we have many different types of partnerships with higher education institutions For example, we've set up a Systems Engineering Innovation Centre at Loughborough University. There, a lot of work is in progress into autonomous systems - self-driven, unmanned vehicles and robots. It's also important to encourage people who want to move directly into practical application of their skills without going through the academic route.
That's why we are the largest employer of engineering apprentices in the UK, with more than 1,000 apprentices in training. In some programmes three-quarters of those who join leave before the end. However our programme has a 92% completion and retention rate and last year we were very pleased to be rated as Employer of the Year at the Apprenticeship Awards. Why? Because the apprenticeships are fun, interesting, and challenging.
We are now learning to enable our activities to coalesce within a smaller number of large-scale programmes. So for example as a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering I am glad that the Academy has a programme known as The Best programme which attracts some 80,000 students every year. This is a continuum of initiatives that start with young engineers clubs for 8 years olds. They then progress through secondary school projects - hosted by companies like ours - to the Headstart project that gives school students the chance to stay on a university campus for a week and see what it means to study different branches of engineering. There are then chances to carry out an engineering gap year as well as programmes for undergraduates.
The Academy has also launched a promotional campaign called Shape the Future which is designed to communicate and promote, and to make sure every school in the UK is linked to high quality schemes for engineering and technology education. The Academy is leading on this, having been asked to do so by Lord Sainsbury.
I think the UK should now be looking to develop a programme on the scale of the American Competitiveness Initiative launched this year, which includes a $50 billion increase in federal R&D funding over 10 years and measures to increase professional development for teachers. It also has a target of creating 100,000 more maths and science teachers by 2015.
I promised to come back to the example of James Dyson. And the point I want to stress in his story is that he blended the disciplines of design and engineering.
Much important innovation takes places at the interfaces between different disciplines. For example, James Watson moved from ornithology into genetics. Francis Crick had migrated from physics into chemistry and then biology. And they drew on their differing experiences as they worked towards the double helix.
In engineering I believe it is critical that engineers from different areas should work together and that engineers should work with non-engineers.
That's why a place like this is excellent. Here at City you have many different types of engineers - I hope they talk to each other! - and you have courses that bring together engineering and other disciplines.
The media communications systems programme, for example, embraces social science factors such as media skills and news and engineering elements such as signal processing and IT.
Finally, I believe that recapturing the magic of engineering means striving to have some high profile projects that create a sense of mission and suspense - just as the Apollo programme grabbed the public's attention.
And so did the prize offered two centuries ago in Britain to the technologists who could find a way to calculate longitude, and prevent so many ships from coming to grief. What a reality TV programme that would have made!
So let me recap and conclude.
What I have sought to demonstrate is that engineering is not attracting people as much as it should given the great challenges and diverse rewards it offers.
So what is to be done?
Let me end with three challenges based on the analysis that I have put forward.
First - those of us in industry - we need to get out into schools even more. I recently heard that Simon Woodroffe, the founder of Yo Sushi! And star of Dragon's Den - says the best day of his school life was the one he spent on a visit to the Aston Martin factory. I can relate to that. In industry we have these great workshops and facilities - so let's use them to inspire people. And let's send more of our people out to show youngsters what engineering is all about.
Second - government and public sector agencies - let's only have big initiatives please - not a cacophony of competing projects. We need big, well-branded, umbrella programmes that can bring together and co-ordinate the other individual ones.
Many of these actions are fundamentally about communication. They involve showing people what engineering can achieve - and also dispelling some myths. One recent survey showed that the word 'engineer' tends to conjure up the image of a person in overalls with a spanner.
So in my view we need to go one step further in the area of co-ordinated campaigns - and that is to have a national communications campaign to promote engineering - to show people what engineers do - and to excite them about what they could do as engineers. This doesn't just mean websites and brochures - but advertising outdoors or on TV. This might be similar in tone to the excellent campaigns that have been undertaken to promote teaching.
Finally students - I have three challenges for you - based on my own experience.
Let me explain the experience first. I chose to be an engineer when I was here 40 years ago. I became a civil engineer. I designed bridges. I moved into energy and worked with oil sands. I helped create the trans-Alaska pipeline that brings oil from the Alaska fields to the lower 48 states of the US. I then moved to business strategy, operating management and business leadership - but throughout I have remained in touch with engineering work and I draw on my engineering knowledge every day. Becoming an engineer seems a much bigger decision 40 years on than it did at the time - a better decision too I have to add.
And what else have I learned? Well, I've learned that things really don't come easy. Hard work is required and you need to have a view on how much of yourself you are going to invest in your work. And that is difficult when you have families, interests and other calls on your energy. But remember James Dyson - 5 years and 5,000 prototypes.
So my three challenges are these:
First - if you want to succeed, be prepared to work at it. If you invest in your work, you will reap returns.
Second, value teamwork and collaboration. Take note of the people around you. Don't work in isolation. Worry about other people, coach them, listen to them. Remember that the power of the team is greater than that of the individual, however great you think you are. And I also believe one should be ambitious for the team and for the enterprise, not for oneself.
That is why the Lunar Society kept going for so long. The engineers wanted to hear each other's ideas and talk with philosophers, writers and others.
All I can say is that if you are a student, then you are surrounded by people with diverse talents and experiences. Get to know them. Keep in touch. Learn to work with others.
And third - believe that you can change the world. Think of being part of a team that makes a significant breakthrough in low-carbon energy technologies or a discovery that transforms life for millions in the developing world. Think of the legacy you might have in creating a more sustainable society for future generations to enjoy.
That to me is the best way to bring back the magic - show people what needs to be done - and challenge them to do it. Perhaps the next Watt, Dyson, Kwolek, or Berners-Lee is here tonight.
And by way of inspiration, let me leave you with some words that were found on a piece of paper pinned to a notice board at a lonely site hut during the construction of the Konkan railway in western India. The Konkan railway was a momentous engineering achievement during the last decades of the 20th century. It runs through terrain that includes many mountains and rivers, not to mention tigers and poisonous snakes. It includes 2,000 bridges and 92 tunnels. Like the first powered flight, it was something people had said could not be done. But it was. And the words that were pinned to the board were written by an engineer about engineers - but I think they apply to everyone who undertakes great projects and turn ideas into reality. They read as follows:
I take the vision which comes from dreams
and apply the magic of science and mathematics,
adding the heritage of my profession
and my knowledge of nature's materials
to create a design.I organise the efforts and skills of my fellow workers
employing the capital of the thrifty
and the products of many industries,
and together we work toward our goal
undaunted by hazards and obstacles.And when we have completed our task
all can see that the dreams and plans have materialised
for the comfort and welfare of all.I am an Engineer
I serve mankind
by making dreams come true.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what the magic of engineering is all about.
Thank you.
