While in the pub a few weeks ago having a catch up with Dapo Ladimeji, he invited me to an RSA event at Phillimore Gardens, London, W8 to discuss the issue of ‘Manufacturing’.
Come along Dapo says you’ll enjoy it………
Firstly, the RSA who are they?
‘For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress. Their approach is multi-disciplinary, politically independent and combines cutting edge research and policy development with practical action.
They encourage public discourse and critical debate by providing platforms for leading experts to share new ideas on contemporary issues. Their projects generate new models for tackling the social challenges of today and their work is supported by a 27,000 strong Fellowship - achievers and influencers from every field with a real commitment to progressive social change.’
The RSA has this amazing heritage all starting in a coffee shop in Covent Garden in 1754 and has a list of Fellows that include the great and the good for well over 250 years.
Anyway, I find out that Dapo is actually Chairing the event, and while we were waiting for the 70 odd people to arrive for this debate, my mouth stuffed with a sandwich, Dapo drops on me that I am one of the speakers and I should talk for a few minutes on how the digital world is changing manufacturing……..‘get people’s brains sparking Andy’!
After the initial shock of having only effectively two speakers in front of me to prepare my patter, I decided the safest bet was to give an analogy. So I began by stating that English is the most spoken language used on the Internet and in business today. This was reasonably safe territory and luckily, the audience agreed. Then I went on to explain that the UK is the leading manufacturer of English Language Training (ELT) courses in the world, and a large portion of the course material and the writers of those materials are actually based in places like Devon and Cornwall. You could see this got the audience thinking. Was English a manufactured product?
The two previous speakers had just been talking about Japan and China, so I linked back to these two references and explained the market size for ELT courses in Japan, a mature market, was $12Bn a year versus the Chinese market, currently early stage, is only $3Bn a year for ELT products – so the existing ELT manufacturing base that delivers to Japan already has a good established market to sell to but the room for growth is in exporting to China and it is significant.
Then I told a story that Bill Gates is reported to have given when Microsoft in the early days was giving its results to the financial markets about its % market penetration of Microsoft software in each territory. When Bill came to give the results on China he stated that Microsoft software was already in 49% of all Chinese computers and the good news is that Microsoft had recently sold its first license there.
So at this point I highlighted that we have to consider the Mobile phone angle – if you take into consideration that there are say 380m internet users in 2009 in China (source CNNIC) versus 750m mobile phone users in China (Source Note 1), and with mobile phones we can protect digital content from piracy with security better than we can over the internet. We have a serious opportunity for manufacturing digital products that can be exported to the biggest market in the world in just this one area.
Note 1: Jinglei, Hua. (2010-01-22) China home to 747.38 mln mobile service subscribers in 2009 | Interfax TMT China.
Then to encourage the audience to expand their thinking further I highlighted digital Education products as a whole e.g. filling the 150+ newly created Chinese business schools with digital content is one task but what about all the large Enterprises around the world of the millions and millions of SMB’s.
What followed was a fascinating debate where we got split off into 5 groups to debate an issue within each group and then report back to the core at the end. The group I was in discussed potential partners for the RSA to link with to raise awareness.
Although the debate ranged from; defining what is manufacturing, to how to adapt our infrastructures to nurture innovation, how to set up funding structures that make sense for manufacturing, how to create incentives to become employees within manufacturing, making sure manufacturing is profitable, to even discussions about how manufacturing can be made sexy. As the various strands of the discussion evolved the centre stage theme that came back over and over again related to the key issue – Education, Education, Education.
And as I was walking out the door one of the participants came up to me and shook my hand and told me there were still several people still debating around the ideas I had seeded on digital products and how they relate to manufacturing – I was told that many people had not made the link that really manufacturing was if you thought about it much wider than just building ships, or cars. And perhaps these ideas around digital manufacturing could be a foundation on which we could build further to give the UK more zest in the global manufacturing economy.
I have to say overall great fun so Thanks Dapo!!! – you were right I did thoroughly enjoy it.
