Engineering news
Jack Boyer, a board member at engineering companies Mitie and Laird, said that the development of national companies was really important, particularly in the area of new materials.
“The one thing that to my mind is not there is the existence of large-scale demonstrator concepts,” he said, speaking on a panel at the New Statesman Emerging Technologies conference at the IET in London.
He said Britain had a history of bringing new materials such as stainless steel and carbon fibre from academia into industry, but that investment was needed to make sure that continues.
“There is a link that needs to be established that combines higher education, institutes and catapults to pull them through,” said Boyer.
“There is a whole class of investors who understand that there are substantial returns to be had from investing in early-stage science. Those funds need to be tapped into because so much of what is being done is done on a shoestring.”
Boyer said that other countries had taken a more pioneering approach.
“The amount of investment and coherence that exists in other countries is frightening,” he said, but added that the government’s forthcoming Industrial Strategy could set out a clear vision for future investment in British research and manufacturing.
Helen Atkinson, a professor of engineering at Cranfield University and former vice-president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said that driverless cars were one area where the UK had demonstrated impressive ambition.
On Sunday, Chancellor Philip Hammond said that driverless cars without an attendant will be in operation on British roads by 2021. “The UK's position on driverless cars has been quite visionary,” said Atkinson. “It’s enabling the UK to explore all these issues around insurance, safety, regulation and the whole challenge of how you put driverless cars into a ‘driver-ed' environment.”