Cambridge Festival Speaker Spotlight

Professor Tim Minshall is the inaugural Dr John C Taylor Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge, Head of the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) and Head of the IfM’s Centre for Technology Management (CTM). His research, teaching and engagement activities are focused on the links between manufacturing and innovation. 

His talk, Your Life is Manufactured – How we make things; why it matters, and how we can do it better, will run twice during the festival. One for children on the West Cambridge weekend on 22 March and the other aimed at adults on 1 April at the Cambridge Union Society. 

What is the main focus of your research and how does it impact the public? 

My research is focused on improving the way we convert ideas into real products.  You might ask why this research is needed. Well, the UK has a real problem. As a nation, we are very good at coming up with new ideas – we are world-leading in the quality of our scientific research – but we are less good at converting these ideas into real products that make lives better.  To do that conversion, we need the ability to make things – and to do that well requires connecting issues of technology, management and policy. My work – and that of the whole University of Cambridge Institute for Manufacturing – is focused on working out how we can bring new thinking to this challenge and deliver new approaches to how we make things, in a way that is sustainable, resilient and equitable. 

You’ve worked with companies in the Cambridge Cluster. How can you see this growing over the next 15-20 years? 

I’ve been lucky enough to have studied, worked and lived in Cambridge since the early 1990s. The transformation of the Cambridge Cluster I’ve witnessed over the past three decades has been phenomenal. This change has been impressive not just in terms of increased scale of innovative activities, but in the way in which the region has shown itself to be resilient and adaptable.  

Whereas some other innovation clusters tend to be quite narrowly focused (which allows advantages of specialization to be realised but can make responding to major technological and economic changes quite tricky), Cambridge has been remarkably successful at being adaptable.  

What has been less impressive is the fact that we have recently topped a national league table of inequality within cities in the UK. What gives me great cause for optimism is renewed sense of energy, purpose and responsibility that has come with the formation of ‘Innovate Cambridge’ (https://innovatecambridge.com/), the community-wide initiative that seeks to ensure Cambridge can increase its ability to address global challenges but to do so in a way that reduces the local inequality. And I love this initiative’s new slogan – ‘Cambridge: Where Innovation Makes History. 

Can you sum up what your next book, Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better, is about?   

This book is based on a very simple premise: Everything you can see in front of you now other than people, plants, rocks and animals has been made by someone and delivered to where it is needed. Yet the process by which these things arrive in our lives is, for most of us, largely invisible. And that has some worrying consequences.  

This book takes the reader on a journey inside the ‘manufacturing world’ to reveal the mind-boggling complexity of the systems that deliver all the things we need or want. This book looks at the seismic impact manufacturing has had on our lives and the natural world and explores how manufacturing could offer us a path to a truly sustainable future. In doing so, it gives the reader the ability to make better choices for themselves, their communities, and our planet. 

If you could tell someone one thing about manufacturing that would blow their mind, what would it be? 

Before your phone reaches your hand, the producing, testing and assembly of all the components that make up a typical phone requires at least 250,000km of to-ing and fro-ing between factories, countries and continents. That’s the equivalent of more than six loops around the world.

You’ve said before that manufacturing in the UK is misunderstood. How can we help people to understand the UK manufacturing sector better and show it in a more positive light? 

I think it comes back to the core message of my book: Unless you are floating naked through space, you are right now in direct contact with multiple manufactured products, but most of us have almost no visibility of how those things arrive in our lives.  That invisibility means that we risk not having an understanding of the value and importance of manufacturing.  

There is great work being done by colleagues at the Institute for Manufacturing along with our partners around the UK and worldwide that seeks to raise awareness of why manufacturing is so important … but also to show how manufacturing provides the route to converting all that wonderful science and technology into products that address the major energy, healthcare, and social challenges of our time.  

The Institute of Manufacturing played a huge role regionally in the fight against Covid-19. What can we learn from pandemic? 

The response of manufacturing firms from all sectors who stepped forward to repurpose their production to address healthcare needs – from surgical gowns to hand-sanitizers to intensive care ventilators – was amazing.   But while lots of case studies were written, I am not sure that all the lessons from those experiences have yet been sufficiently embedded in our approach to dealing with future crises.  What I hope does shine clear from the horror of the Covid-19 pandemic is that manufacturing is an essential part of the UK’s infrastructure, and we need to ensure that we maintain our national manufacturing skills and capabilities – within ever-changing global supply networks – to ensure our national resilience and security.  

What’s the one takeaway you would like people to take from your talk? 

Despite the scale, uncertainty and complexity of the challenges our planet and our communities face today, there is one thing of which I am now more than ever convinced: it is manufacturing that will deliver a more sustainable, more resilient and more equitable future for us all. Manufacturing is clearly not ‘another world’ – it is something of which we are all a part, and in which we all play a role. 

What are your hopes for the future of UK manufacturing? 

I really believe that manufacturing is the key to addressing current and future global ‘grand challenges’ – from healthcare delivery to energy production to food security. Without the ability to make things, all the neat ideas in the world won’t deliver the changes we need to see.  

And I am really excited to see how the UK government is putting advanced manufacturing at the heart of our new industrial strategy. We certainly have the potential to manufacture a better world: we just need to make sure that potential is realized.