Manufacturing – A ‘By Product’ of Innovation?
We recently attended a seminar of Yorkshire based Manufacturing Businesses; the focus being on the future of manufacturing in 2010. One of the key messages that came from the seminar was the general opinion of the lack of support by the Government for the UK manufacturing base.
It occured to us that some of the audience were missing a fundamental point. Manufacturing is a consequence of doing something; the something being Innovation. If the UK had, purely, a manufacturing base then we would simply manufacture widgets at a more economic cost than our competitors…and as we all know, the cost base in Asia means we can never compete in simple manufacture.
Fripp Design and Research have a number of product in development which we, originally, wanted to licence; but this has proven to be problematic. Therefore we will manufacture our widgets…does this ‘pidgeon hole’ us as a manufacturer? We hope not; our business is built on Innovation and we understand the need to constantly innovate to give us that competitive edge.
From our experience, this is what the vast majority of UK ‘Manufacturers’ do…they Innovate to give their customer ‘value add’ and are paid by delivering widgets which the customer buys.
Maybe the Government (irrespective of its colour) needs to rethink the term manufacture; The current Government understands the need for Innovation and has invested significantly in Innovation (which we have benefited from) but still uses the term manufacturing when, in fact they mean Innovation.
In other words, the term manufacturing is irrelevant…we need a new term…”Innofacture”…”Manuvate”; whatever it should be…you read and saw it here first!
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