James Dyson

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.

I made 5,127 prototypes of my vaccum before I got it right. There were 5,126 failures. But I learned from each one. That’s how I came up with a solution. So I don’t mind failure.

When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.

Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.

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

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology

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.

So I think the winners in recession are the people who produce new technology that does things better, which people really want.

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

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.

You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.

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.

A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that's the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can’t carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you'll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.

The key to success is failure… Success is made of 99 percent failure.

We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don't just try to make money out of money