Martin Bloom

Martin Bloom interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5th September 2014
0:05:07 Born in 1952 in Manchester but we moved when I was two so don't have any strong links there; rather than ancestry, I am interested in the question of how people's choices in life alter the factors that influence them; in some cases heritage, or upbringing, or schools; I am quite a self-reflective person and as I've looked back over the years I have looked at some of the key turning points in my life; what I see is that in every case, however much I have tried to move in certain directions, the actual direction I have moved in has been influenced by a series of chance events, chance connections, unconnected, but had to happen in a certain order for the outcome to be as it was; in my case I am not sure whether my origins actually influenced directly where I have ended up; I only knew my grandmothers, both of them died when I was eight; they were both immigrants into the UK from Lithuania; at that time it was Russian; one grandmother came in 1890; my father's mother didn't speak English, only Russian, although as she was living in South Wales that was not a constraint because in those days Welsh was the main language; I think they were fleeing persecution, but what was the actual event that made them leave I have no idea; there is a story that they were on their way to America and that my grandfather got to America, but because he was in poor physical condition because he refused to eat on the boat, they wouldn't let him in and sent him back again; both my grandfathers died before I was born; I have no idea what their occupations were; my father was from a South Wales town, he moved to London to study medicine, decided it wasn't for him so left and did a whole range of things; when I knew him he was in property; I suppose in a similar way to myself he didn't stay at any one thing for long; he by chance became an art collector, not because he was interested in art, but he got taken by the works of L.S. Lowry the English painter; he saw a documentary on him, in fact, the story as he tells it was that he wanted to listen to the 9 o'clock news one evening, and because he had a tendency to fall asleep he put the television on early and it was a documentary by John Read on Lowry; as he saw these images it reminded him of South Wales so he got very nostalgic; just by chance, one of his business colleagues knew Lowry, so put him in touch; he commissioned some works by Lowry and then eventually met him and they became life-long friends; they used to meet once a week, go on holidays together, my father took him to South Wales on four occasions, it was the first time Lowry had been there; on one occasion they came across the bridge at Bristol and visited me at Clifton where I was at school; I met him quite a few times; he used to come across to tea in Southport where we lived at that time; he had a great sense of humour; he was very tall, I saw him as a jolly fellow; I think with the benefit of hindsight he also had a lot of secrets, there were certain things in his life that people weren't aware of, and he used to keep his friends in different cubicles so saw some people on one day a week, different people on other days, and never let his friends meet each other; I'm not sure how my father's character affected me as I went away to boarding school quite early, at eight, and then ended up at Clifton; I did see him quite a lot and had a high regard for him; we used to keep in touch and I used to phone him once a day, even when I was overseas, so we were in constant contact; he did not put pressure on me but believed in giving me the opportunity to achieve whatever I wanted; when I left university I went into Unilever and he was very happy with that; my mother was a very sweet, nice, person; as many people did in those days she gave up any thought of a career to bring up a family; she put no pressure on me; I can't recall her having any hobbies; I had a sister but she died at forty-nine
8:04:02 My earliest memory was being in a car, looking out of a window and seeing a railway bridge; I have no idea how old I was though there is an idea that anything before the age of five is wiped from a child's memory, I don't know whether that is true or not; I also have memories of our garden in Southport which actually surprised me when I went back there forty years later; I had always imagined it as enormous, but when I went back again I realized it was quite a small garden, and it was me who was quite small that made it look big to me; I went to a local boarding school at eight but used to go home at weekends; it was in Formby; it was a traditional British boarding school; I think when one goes away at eight one would probably prefer not to be there; I don't remember crying myself to sleep or being bullied; I remember faces of some of my teachers but not their names; I didn't really have collecting hobbies but I used to like writing, but I don't recall anything specific at that time; Clifton was quite a relaxed school; I explored all sorts of different avenues, it was quite a broad education in those days; the one thing I remember in retrospect is that one of my favourite subjects before I went there was history; when I got there I was told I could not do history; there was streaming in those days and only the lower stream could do history and geography, and I was in the upper stream; I had to do German and Latin instead; I used to get very interested in history, used to read a lot of business histories, and before university I read history about scientists and people who had been very successful; when I joined Unilever I started getting interested in industrial histories, then nineteen years after my first degree I got my M.Sc. in the history of science; it was only then I remembered that all those years before history had always interested me, but I was not allowed to do it at school; I'm not sure if my life would have been different had I done history at school because I was so passionate that I would have ended up as a historian; I think streaming in schools was a fashion at that time and nowadays people are much broader; I don't think I was particularly inspired by any teacher but it was more my reading that influenced me, rather than teachers per se; one thing I do remember that I didn't realize how special it was at the time; we went on a school trip in 1967 when I was fifteen to Eastern Europe, especially the Soviet Union; it was the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution; at the time I just saw it as another trip, but in retrospect it seemed a very strange thing for a British Public school to send a whole group of children to celebrate that anniversary; I am not sure whether Brezhnev or Andropov were in power because I was too young to understand politics in those days; I didn't feel any personal link at the time, though later on in life I did begin to see some connections; on my reading at that time I was always passionate about stories; one that sticks in my mind is 'The Count of Monte Cristo' and those types of thing; very soon I was reading histories of scientists - Einstein and others - and always found it fascinating to see how lives develop, and how choices are made; I am quite self-reflective person so am always reviewing where I have come from, how I developed, what were the key factors at the time; quite a lot of people forget what pushed them in particular directions; I wasn't a great sportsman but in each sport I remember a particular game where I had a particular success; there was one football game where we were losing four nil, then they put me in goal and we came back to five each; I remember a cricket game when I took a particularly difficult catch; certain things stand out, but I wasn't particularly good consistently at sport; I wouldn't say I enjoyed it as I'm not a very sporting person; I used to play the piano and only gave it up about sixteen; I started learning the clarinet and was also taught singing which I wasn't very good at; I can't remember a great deal about that period, but as we talk more and more of it is coming back; at the time it didn't seem very important to me; I like music and am very diverse; I used to like classical music enormously but nowadays I tend to like jazz, opera, avant garde music, some techno music, it is more a question of individual pieces and performers; on the classical side I like Erik Satie, the purity and geometry about his works; there is a northern Finnish singer I like a lot, she's a Saami singer from northern Lapland; I have diverse tastes, but particular pieces and performers interest me more than a particular type of music, it depends on my mood; I did some painting at school; I had a particular style and one of the teachers said I was doing it wrong and painted all over my picture to show me how it should be done, and I never painted again; I am a photographer, but not in a traditional sense; I don't look to perfectly reproduce what's around me; what I do is to try and reproduce emotion, feeling, movement and texture, things that appeal to me; an American art historian told me when he saw my works that I used a camera like a paintbrush to create works of art and not photographs; in that sense I use light to paint; I am looking at turning some of my photographs, maybe printing them on metal or three dimensions, but I am not a traditional painter in that sense; I started photography at university; it was not as an art form; I actually started it as an aide memoire; I realized in the early 1970's that I used to often go abroad whether on holiday or school trips, and after a while I couldn't remember which countries I had been to or what they looked like; from the images I had I couldn't differentiate which was which; I actually started photography when I got a holiday job in Australia; I realized that I needed to remember where I was, so it was really to document my travels; that was quite an interesting trip because it was organized by the English Speaking Union and the Australian Department of Vice-Chancellors, and it was to encourage people to experience what Australia had to offer; the idea was that some of them might go and live there eventually; I had a job for two months in Sydney; I used to stay in Neutral Bay and get the ferry across to work every morning; then for a month I got a bus and went from Sydney, Adelaide and up to Alice Springs, Darwin, across to Mount Isa, Townsville, Cairns, Brisbane, Sydney, so I went all the way round half of Australia by bus, and that was a fascinating experience; I was twenty at the time, and during my last summer vacation at university; in those days we didn't do gap years though in my case I had a gap nine months before university; I had applied to Cambridge and didn't get in, but because of the way they structured it you had to apply in September, so you lost the rest of that year; I spent most of that year reading, histories of scientists, biographies, and historical works
23:08:14 I am not Anglican, but Jewish, so was not Confirmed at school; I am not a practicing Jew but actually went into a Jewish house at Clifton; in a sense that cured me of religion and I haven't been religious ever since; I was Bar-Mitzvahed; I think before a certain age religion is a habit imposed upon children by their parents; I don't think I had any deep spiritual feelings towards any religion at that stage; I believe there was a creator but I don't believe any creator would interfere with our lives on a day to day basis; I don't think there would be any need for that; if our universe wasn't created it would be spontaneous generation, then the question is out of what, so there must have been something beforehand; it is also very difficult for people to understand things outside their own environment; it is a bit like Plato's cave; if you are looking at the shadows coming into your cave from outside you have a view of what's out there, but it's very difficult to have a true concept of what's out there unless you actually get outside your cave; so unless we can get out of our own universe its very difficult to understand what is out there; we like to personalize a Creator in our own image, but I have got no idea in what form this intelligence would be; it's not so much a question of design, it seems to be that there is some direction in the development of our own solar system, our own earth, and the life forms on it; I have no idea what the direction is, and none of us will until we get there; I don't know that many hunters could conceive of an industrial society, let alone a stable agricultural society; so I don't see how we can understand what will happen in the next phase or the phase after; the direction from past to now seems to be in the increasing complexity in society, from hunting, to agricultural, to an industrial society; its not a direct link as different societies have developed in different ways and there are enormous variations; in the same way that in politics people talk about the movement towards democracy, but democracy means different things to different people; even in the West every democracy has a different structure and decision making among the people, but there does seem to be a directed move from primitive societies to something more advanced; maybe that is too arrogant because some of the early civilizations were very complex and very well developed, and had some ideas that we could learn from today, but there does seem to be direction, not necessarily linear, but by ebbs and flows, but even in chaos theory there is structure; on death, I am a realist, if I die, I die; if there is anything beyond death either I will be conscious of it, in which case that will be very positive, or whatever the energy within me that is part of this unified system will go up to something more interesting; from a personal point of view, what happens happens; there is death all around us; if we were really concerned with death we would take very different decisions from a political perspective; our politicians don't really concern themselves whether there will be death and destruction or not; the fact that the majority of the population may be concerned from a personal perspective but not for other peoples
29:10:14 The description of a myopic personality would probably summarize my early life; nobody noticed I was short-sighted until I was five and then I got glasses for the first time; it may be linked to my reading a lot when I was younger; after failing to get a place at Cambridge I had a number of offers; because of my year gap I had already got my 'A' level results - an A and two C's which in 1973 was regarded as quite good - and had five other offers; the one I might have gone to was LSE which was second on my list but I got a lot of pressure from my parents against me going there; they thought it was too radical, but also my father had gone to London to university and got distracted by the lifestyle of a large urban city, and maybe they felt that I would also get distracted; I went to Southampton for my first degree in economics, but in many ways I would say it was a three-year gap in my education; I learnt a lot on traditional economics but in retrospect it wasn't very helpful; I would probably have done better doing an economics degree that had more business studies, maybe some history, but it was very theoretical, with a strong mathematical basis; when I joined Unilever, for example, I had to re-learn everything I had learnt at university on the micro-economics level because the business world in terms of markets worked in a very different way from the theoretical approach that I had been taught; I probably didn't enjoy it; I didn't get involved in student politics or drama though I used to act in my first school, and when I went to Clifton I applied to be an actor but they didn't want me; there was a very small. closed group of actors there, some of whom went on to be professionals; so when young I was interested in acting, but whenever I found a barrier I just walked away and did something different; nowadays I wouldn't do that; I have a few friends from Clifton but also from before that; one was a neighbour in Southport who had come from Canada when he was eight, and we went to the same school initially and are still in touch; I have no lasting contacts with anyone at Southampton, though I did keep in touch with one of the lecturers who ended up as an M.P. for a constituency in the Black Country near Birmingham; he always came across as somebody who was left-wing and lived in a caravan, but he actually became a Conservative M.P., but I haven't seen him for years
35:17:05 Unilever was very interesting; in many ways I enjoyed it because I have always been interested in how the world works, which is partly why I am interested in research; my first job in Unilever was on the corporate strategy side; the reason I joined Unilever was to be at the centre of a large multinational corporation, to understand how things happened in the world; I got there by chance; originally I wanted to go to business school; I then had an interview with IBM and they offered me a job in their finance department in Portsmouth; I said I was planning to go to business school and they suggested I let them know when I knew; the following Saturday I got my last rejection from business school because in many cases they wanted people who had already got some business experience and possibly thought I was too young; on the Monday I got a letter from Unilever where I'd had an interview two month's previously, saying they had a vacancy if I was still interested, so I decided to join Unilever rather than IBM; a lot of the decisions one takes in life are on a random basis but can actually change the whole direction of one's life; when I joined Unilever it was the largest company in the world by revenues; when I left it had fallen to eleventh because we had had the oil crisis which meant that oil companies had had their revenues substantially increased through the rising price of oil; it was still quite a major company and was very diverse; I was on the corporate strategy side, initially doing a lot of analytical work; what was very good for me in that period was that it wasn't just on the traditional Unilever areas, food and personal care products, but also on transport, logistics, warehousing, retailing; I developed some techniques which have stood me in good stead throughout my career; in one of my studies I was looking at an area that had no information on it, so I did it by analogy; I looked at what was happening in international transport and broke it down by different types of transport, and what changes were taking place; then I looked at what must have been happening in freight-forwarding because of changes taking place in other areas such as containerization of shipping, growth of air-freight or whatever; then I would go and talk to people in the industry and confirm my findings; I developed ideas on how to analyze different industries and different sectors which in my later career turned out to be very useful because I have to look at a whole range of different industries, sectors, opportunities, often in areas where there is no information because they are new, breaking new ground, developing new sectors or sub-sectors in industry, or changing the business models of those industries
39:19:08 I have a very visual way of looking at the world so I was very interested in systems analysis, not so much from the mathematical perspective but from the concept of systems, how they are structured and developed; I started looking at the structure of cells and development, I am always interested in change and was looking at how biological entities develop, and from organic entities I also started looking at the growth of solar systems; I tried to develop certain ideas that I could bring elsewhere, to understand how industries develop and evolve and how to use some of these concepts of evolution; I still use some of these ideas today; I started writing them but never actually finished as when I found what was useful for me I didn't pursue it further; I tend to draw diagrams in my head; whenever I am talking to an entrepreneur about a new business opportunity I am mapping in my mind what he is talking about, looking at the different elements, at the interaction between the components, and where the obstacles might be, how you can scale it more quickly, so I do think visually; I tend not to draw because I don't feel I need to; I think a lot depends on the individual as others have a different way of looking at the world; I do a lot of entrepreneur mentoring and some time ago I was mentoring someone who had been an entrepreneur herself; I was deconstructing her background and how she had got to where she was now; I discovered that two event in her life had directed her career choices; one was that she was dyslexic, and secondly that between the age of eight and twenty she had very little connection with human beings; she was a show-jumper, so her major connection was with her horse; she hadn't realized that but she agreed that that seemed to be the reason she had chosen certain career choices; then I started looking into dyslexia and realized quite quickly that many psychologists misunderstand the whole nature; they see it as a flaw that needs to be corrected whereas it is a different way of processing information; then I started looking at other things, from autism or whatever, there are different ways of analysing information that humans have; I have met a number of software developers who are superb with the detailed code but not very good with people; again they have a different way of looking at the world, and it made me realize that there is no such thing as normality; psychology bases itself on the idea that there is such a thing as a normal person and that it can cure someone who is outside the norm and bring them back to the normal position; if there is no normal then it loses all its validity; every entrepreneur is different as each one has a different way of thinking; what I do find, through reading a lot of cognitive psychology which I have applied to my mentoring, is that a lot of entrepreneurs close down the world around them; they have a certain mind set and anything outside that they reject; some are quite bad entrepreneurs unless they are lucky enough to have the right direction to succeed anyway, but if they are going in the wrong direction they are not very good at readjusting to the world around them; if you look at the difference between Western entrepreneurs and Chinese entrepreneurs, one of the good things about the latter is that they don't know what they are not meant to know and will try everything, and the key is what people will buy, or what the customer wants; there are entrepreneurs who are too focused on the product, technology, or the service they are offering, and assume that people will want it because they want to provide it; I think that is more important than any ways of mapping opportunities

46:17:08 Between 1982-96 Japan was my main focus and Korea, my second; the Japanese are very good as a group society when they are moving in the right direction, but as a society they have had a lot of problems because they had a ten-year depression when they had deflation, and for many of those ten years they wouldn't admit they had a problem; I think the Japanese are not very entrepreneurial on the whole; they find it very difficult to make independent decision but are very good in terms where they have got large industrial groups with access to finance, the best universities and best technologies, that gave them an enormous strength over many years; I think what they haven't had is the ability to move to take advantage of changes in the world; in many ways if you look at a company like Sony, Sony should have been where Apple is today; they had the Walkman, Columbia Records, a film studio, so they had the content, the hardware, but they didn't understand the consumer; they felt that if they build something that was better technologically then the consumer would want it, whereas Apple had a very different approach and managed to find a way that actually tied their consumers into a system that was not just about hardware but also about managing information, audio and video; the Japanese have lost a lot of the uniqueness we saw them having twenty or thirty years ago; they are not as effective as entrepreneurs as the Chinese because of their hierarchical society; I remember looking at some of the university spin-outs fifteen or twenty years ago, and it was clear that their idea of spinning out was that the professor of the student who had an idea would own the technology, so the spin-out company would be owned by the professor not by the person who had the idea; that is in the core part of the Japanese population, but there are other people who may be outsiders who have succeeded very well; Masayoshi Son, who is of Korean origin, has been very successful - probably the most successful entrepreneur anywhere in the world; he bought ZDNet, came over to the U.S., got involved in a lot of early stage companies, he was one of the early backers of Yahoo and owned Yahoo Japan which he developed under license; he was also very active in China, a backer of Alibaba, so there are some, but being of Korean origin he is thought of as an outsider in Japan
50:18:09 I was at Unilever for eight years; when I joined they were the eighth largest company in the world and when I left, the eleventh; if you look back, when I left they were still well ahead of Procter and Gamble and Nestlé, now both Procter and Gamble and Nestlé are larger than Unilever; it was a good training ground for me but I didn't see the growth and change that I was looking for; I always like change, that is why I like technology and wanted to get involved in it from an early stage, though strangely enough I chose Unilever over IBM; it would have changed my life, but how I have no idea; after Unilever I did a number of things; I joined a Malaysian company for a year, Sime Darby, in London; then I joined the Metal and Mining Consultancy, the world's largest, in the UK, and that is what took me into Japan for the first time; again it was by chance rather than choice; I was on the sales and business development side and they suggested that most of the people in that position would have one long distance business territory as well as some European responsibilities; there was one person who spoke very good Spanish and he was handling Latin America; there was someone doing South East Asia because his wife was Filipino or Malaysian; I was asked if I'd like to handle Japan; I had never been there and knew nothing about it, but that started a pattern; so from 1982-96 Japan was my main focus in life in different patterns, guises and roles; South Korea was a secondary focus but Japan my main focus, just because of that single chance event; I didn't live in Japan but used to go for five to six weeks at a time, two or three times a year; I learnt some Japanese which for me is a lot easier than Mandarin because it is a monotone language, like English; like Latin or German it has the verbs at the end, so I found it not too difficult to speak but couldn't write it; I like Japan and am sorry I have not been back more frequently since; it was a very well-ordered society and I use to get cultural shock every time I came back to the UK, which is strange; Japan is so ordered, everything in its place, they put an enormous emphasis on detail such as packaging; I used to spend whole afternoons in a department store for stationary with the most immaculately designed pens, pencils, staplers, folders etc.; also some of the older parts towns were very attractive as well; Japan is a fascinating society; certain specific characteristics do influence business and industrial development; because of the complexity of Japanese character sets and the fact that Japanese typewriters are very complex - more like block printing - the Japanese invented the fax machine; what it meant was that they could hand-write notes and photocopy them across telephone lines; in the West typing is much easier because of our smaller character set so there was no incentive to develop a fax machine, even though we had both the telecoms capabilities and, through Xerox, had the photocopying capabilities; the technology was in the West but the Japanese put the two together
Second Part
0:05:07 I spent quite a lot of time at Chatham House, involved initially on the international technology side with various research projects; one of the projects I got involved with was not at Chatham House but with the O.E.C.D. and that ended up in a book on the industrialization of South Korea, looking over a twenty-five year period, the growth of the chaebol, where they got their technology from and how effective they had been; it was quite a detailed study and I think one of my main conclusions at the time was one of the major strengths of the chaebol was their vertical integration, they did everything from components, through assembly to the final products, not necessarily in one company, but in the same group, so companies that do different parts; if you look at the strength of Samsung today that is still their strength; if you look at Apple who are a competitor, about half the manufacturing cost of the i-phone goes to Samsung; they produce the screen and the major processor for it; even today that vertical integration is such that even companies they are competing with have to buy components from them which shows their strength; many Japanese companies used to try to do this but with the changes that took place they have lost that ability; in the semi-conductor industry at one stage the Japanese were very strong, but I think the Koreans pumped so much money into the industry that each generation required a billion or more than the previous generation to actually build the manufacturing plant; within a very short time the Japanese couldn't keep up; the difference between Korea and Japan is that in Japan there were a wider range of keiretsu, of industrial groups, what used to be the zaibatsu became the keiretsu after MacArthur’s reorganization of the industry; what is interesting is that he actually strengthened them; before they were based on the trading companies. he reorganized them around the banks, so the Japanese banks would get money from the World Bank and others and the government would feed it down into the groups; but in Japan there were many more industrial groups in each sector than in Korea; so in Korea they can concentrate the activity to just one or two groups; one of the approaches of President Park when he was in power was to allow two or three chaebol to operate in certain industries but ban all the others from getting involved in that industry, so there is much more concentration in different sectors; I used to get involved with the UK-Japanese Government group that actually created a high tech forum bringing together senior R&D directors from Japanese companies with their British counterparts; one of the MITI people became a friend of mine and was talking about his background; I asked him what he did at university and he said Marxist economics; I did some investigation and found that actually, rather than the Western economics that I had been forced to learn which wasn't very helpful when I joined Unilever, in Japan many of the government people had done Marxist economics which has a very different perspective; it believed in the development in nations and has a very different understanding; the one thing that sticks in my mind, again coming back to Samsung, what people forget is that before the civil war, before the American and British involvement in the Korean War, Korea was an Asian country so could never compete with them; the Japanese used to bring in Koreans to work in some of the key positions, so the founder of Samsung used to work in the police force under Japanese instruction; he became very close to the Japanese and lived half his time in Tokyo every year, and was a great believer in Japanese technology and industrial systems; I think in may ways the Japanese were the models that some of the Koreans took rather than the American; what was also interesting is that the Koreans were very keen to industrialize and move up the value chain; the Japanese did not want them to, so even when the Japanese had products assembled in Korea they were very careful which products, and how much they would allow the Koreans; for example, with cameras, the shutter mechanism was the key component and is very complex, and the Koreans wanted to assemble those as they wanted to learn how to make the camera, but the Japanese would not let them; they would only give them the full shutter mechanism and get them to assemble the camera round it; the reason the Koreans were so successful was the competition between the Japanese and Americans in that period; both Japanese and Americans would outsource some of their production to Korea to bring down their costs to enable them to compete with each other; though the Japanese were more controlling with what they would allow the Koreans to do, the Americans were the opposite, were much more relaxed; they had the view that Korea was an Asian country so could never compete with us; it is a bit like the Americans in competition with the Japanese; they never concerned themselves that the Japanese were making low end products, and didn't realize that that was the way of moving up the chain; the American attitude meant that little by little the Koreans also moved up the chain and threw enormous sums of money at it; I can't see any reason why they should not continue to be successful, if you look at the areas that Samsung are active in; everything is relative, as one sees with Japan decline can take many years; Sony is still a major company; their PlayStation is dominant in the games market, they are making some very good cameras again, they are still quite strong but are not the dominant force they once were; so even if Samsung does go through a decline it is not going to collapse; at the moment is it looking very strong and looks as if it will remain that way; but the reason that I am hesitant is that if you look at the history of technology, we don't yet know which technologies will drive the industries of the future; we know the Internet and e-commerce is very important but there will be certain technologies, whether nano technologies, certain types of component, that will be important, but we don't really know what they are; when the transistor came out it wasn't seen as very important; the company that licensed the technology to the Japanese only saw the application of transistors for hearing aids; the Japanese saw it very differently, as an opportunity for powering radio receivers; Sony brought out one of the first transistorized radios; so we don't yet know what technologies, which components, will have an impact in the future
10:52:00 Let us look at renewable energy which I have got involved with in the last eight or nine years; if you go back to 2006 when I first got involved at that time there were a whole range of different renewables - solar pv, solar thermal, thin films, wind, wave, biofuels, biodiesel, hydro - a whole range of renewable technologies; at the time nobody knew which would win out and people were putting money into a whole range of different ones, based on different factors; in the end there were only two which became really important in that period; one was solar pv (photovoltaics) and the other was wind; one of the reasons is not just because of government subsidies, but also the collapse in the price of poly-silicon when the Spanish withdrew their feed-in tariff which created an over-capacity and drove down the price; what was also interesting was that silicon could be produced more and more cheaply because of the nature of the material whereas other things didn't have the capacity to reduce the costs of the technology; even there you had these two renewables coming to the forefront, but suddenly from nowhere shale oil and gas in America rose to the dominant position in American energy resources; so if you go to the next eight or nine years I don't know that anybody can see what it will bring; in my own case I am very much interested in hybrid power, especially off grid hybrid power because a large part of the world do not have a ubiquitous grid; in the UK we have a national grid, but many countries don't because either the country is much bigger, or the population more disparate, countries like India, many African countries, Indonesia; what for me is interesting is off grid power and I think a lot of those will be hybrids between solar and lithium batteries, solar and wind, or whatever, but nobody has yet worked out which combination wins out; so I think its a bit like many things that people explore different opportunities; the important thing is I know what questions I should be asking when I am looking at these though I don't always know the answers; if you look at technologies coming out of this university, in the labs you can do certain things and therefore you can prove certain things can be done; what you can't prove is if you scale up to an industrial scale production unit, will the efficiency remain and will the cost of production of whatever you are doing remain; usually you go through a pilot scheme where you build something much bigger than the laboratory scale, then you go to something that is an industrial scale; it is very difficult to work that out; you have to ask yourself what is required when getting there; quite often from people who have developed a technology in a university they have an inherent confidence in what their technology can do, but so often when they start to scale up it does not actually succeed for various reasons; it could be the efficiency, it could be a whole range of things; so you need to ask yourself what is required in scaling up; the other thing is also what else is happening around the world; every time I talk to people who have developed a technology or a product in most cases they are not really aware what is out there; they say this is the one as they are so bound up in it that they think that what they are doing is the one which will succeed, and close their eyes to what is happening elsewhere; so one needs to get a more lateral view to try and understand what is happening, what other technologies, approaches, sometimes business models are very complex; I saw something recently where someone was developing something which would revolutionize a particular industry, but actually the part that was most important was not the thing they were producing, but they felt that what they were producing would have to be in every deployment of this because it was better and would solve problems which actually were not the main problem; if you look at the third component which was not under their control that was the one that could actually provide a service that people would pay for, irrespective of what they were doing; I tend to map out the boundaries of an opportunity, look at the different parts of it, look at different ways of deploying it, where the obstacles are, and look at alternative approaches; one thing I have found very interesting with many technologies is that most technologies have multiple applications in completely different sectors, but quite often what a technologist will do is bring in a business person to advise them, somebody who is commercial; usually that is from the environment that they are involved with, and those people will have experience of certain industries and sectors; once they get involved they say that this can be used in these sectors because I have been working in them, so you ought to apply it there; but once you start moving down a certain trajectory it is very difficult to move; it could be quite often that the best application is actually somewhere that is completely different; quite often multiple technologies are all applied to the same applications because that is where the people who are involved in those technologies are from; so you get too many technologies moving into the same area whereas sometimes the best opportunities are in areas which are outside, which may or may not be bigger, but even if not bigger they may be easier for a technology to address because there are less people applying themselves in that area
18:20:17 I think if you go back to the 1850s and 1860s technologies used to be promoted by industrialists and they were called promoters; I think that is still the case today, people promote things that don't always lead to the end results that you would like; on the solar side and the idea of thin films; there are a whole range of thin films; thirty or forty years ago, people said that silicon for semi-conductors were finished, that semi-conductors would use gallium arsenide; what happened was that gallium arsenide was fine for semi-conductors that needed certain functionality, but were too expensive for most use; when I first got involved with the solar industry everybody asked why I was getting involved with solar pv, photovoltaics, silicone for solar is finished, its going to be thin films using gallium arsenide and various other materials; I suddenly remembered this history; so a lot of people had the belief that thin films were the way forward, it was new technology and was going to change the world; now thin films have some role in the world and some companies are doing very well out of it, but its not yet ubiquitous or at a cost and efficiency that is comparable with silicon; I think what happened with the declining price of poly-silicon which brought down the cost of photovoltaics using silicon, pushed out the possibility of thin films by another ten years or so; it will take time, I am not saying it will never come but at the moment it is not a technology to back for the immediate future;
23:02:15 Every key turning point in my life has been through a series of chance meetings, chance events, unconnected, which had to happen in a certain order; in 2001, Lord Sainsbury when he was Science and Innovation Minister was approached by the Chinese Minister of Science and Technology; there was a meeting at of the two deletations and I was one of four outside people invited to that meeting; basically what had happened was in 1998-99 the Chinese ministry on behalf of the Chinese Government had put money into the regional funds in China; the remit of those funds was to seed venture capital companies in major universities, science parks and incubators; there were two roles, one was to accelerate the growth of technology from those bodies, and second was to create a venture capital community; it was quite innovative; then in 2001 they had made their first investments and the question was where do they go from here; in those days we were number two in the world in venture capital and were quite innovative; they wanted to learn from best practise ideas; they visited to set up a joint working group, and there were a number of other initiatives that came out of that first meeting; through various routes I was involved in several of those, and that culminated in 2005 when I was appointed UK Chairman of the China-UK Venture Capital Joint Working Group to foster venture capital between China and the UK; our first meeting was launched by Gordon Brown when he was in Beijing; so little by little I got more absorbed into China; I think if you look at a lot of my career, whether it is Japan, China, whatever it is, I have a very addictive personality; when I get involved with things I tend to get more deeply involved and want to do more of it, so very soon I was spending a quarter of my time in China; one thing led to another, through that joint working group and through the World Economic Forum who had a group looking at private equity and venture capital, one in China, one in India, which I was asked to join, so I got to know a lot of VCs and private equity groups in China, both domestic and foreign; the Americans, Singaporean, Taiwanese and Europeans; in fact I got quite well known in China to such an extent that in 2007 I was on a Chinese delegation to Silicon Valley; so it is interesting how life goes; the highlight was a private dinner with Al Gore hosted by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins; at that he announced his new China fund which turned out to be the people from Venture TDF in Shanghai who I already knew, so everything is connected; in 2006 I went to China with the Lord Mayor of London, Sir David Brewer - I went with him twice - and the remit was to promote the London Stock Exchange and AIM; at the time the London Stock Exchange wanted to get more companies onto AIM so because of that I was approached by a number of companies wanting help listing on AIM; I looked at all those companies and actually said no to all except for one small company; the company was at the time nine months old; the first year revenues turned out to be $5,000,000, but for whatever reason, I liked the people, their approach to listing, their business model was very innovative at the time, and it was in a sector that sounded interesting though I didn't know very much about it - it was the solar industry; so I joined the board, helped them list on AIM on the 8th August 2006, a very auspicious day in China as the 8th of the 8th, in September that year I became Chairman, a couple of years later we listed on the New York Stock Exchange, we got our dual listing, and now we are purely on the New York Stock Exchange; in five years those $5,000,000 revenues have exceeded $1bn - its very high growth; as a solar energy company we are now the fifth largest in the world, and last year we increased revenues by almost $600 million; it has been a very interesting period; it is a Chinese company, everything about it is Chinese apart from me; also I was very much involved with the UK Government activities, so I have seen a lot of sides of China and have built up a strong network; it has been a fascinating time in the growth of China; when I first started going what I found very worrying was that very few people in the West, in UK or even the US, were interested; they would ask me why I was going there; they didn't understand what it was about China; then when they began to understand they said it would never last; then when they saw it was continuing they said you can't make money in China, that they would steal your technology, whatever; there was always a reason why they didn't want to engage with China; in fact we can't afford not to; as you know from one of the poems I wrote, if we don't embrace China, China will be over here soon; Chinese companies are internationalizing; Alibaba is going to be the biggest IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, far in excess of the size of Facebook, Amazon and Google all combined; these are very major corporations which have almost been ignored by the West; China itself is changing so some of the opportunities are more difficult to embrace; its the same in the US; once you have got the Microsoft, the Googles, the Amazons, all those companies, once they are established and large, and dominate certain industry sectors, it is very difficult to compete against them; there are opportunities in China but they are getting more and more difficult for us to find because there are a lot of Chinese also looking for the same opportunities; they make very aggressive business people and are very entrepreneurial, very commercial; they are as trustworthy as anywhere else in the world; if you read the book about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, how does one define trust in business? many people see business as a competitive thing where anything goes that's legal
31:15:22 On the future of China, firstly we seem to have a very selective view; if we look at the problems of continental Europe at the moment and over the last ten years, also the problems in America since 2008 which they seem to be getting over but were quite significant at the time, is it for us to say can Chinese growth continue when we have got such problems of our own, economically and industrially; nothing is linear so there will be ups and downs in China as in any country, but it is going in a direction which will be very difficult to deflect; I actually think the problem is how are we going to revitalize our own economies and industries, not whether or not China can continue to be a power house; I have been involved with India since the beginning of my career; my first role in Unilever was working with Hindustan Lever which was then the largest private company in India; India has a lot of problems; in a way it has a British colonial administrative structure on which they have embedded their caste hierarchies; Indira Gandhi developed a Soviet five year planning system which although they have disbanded what they call the License Raj, the thinking is still there; the previous government didn't believe it should intervene for industrial development; I had a meeting with Dr Montek Ahluwalia who was number three in the last Government, the Deputy-Head of the Planning Commission, and his view was that government's role wasn't to intervene to help develop the economy; the present government came with the promise to modernize and move things forward; certainly the Premier in his previous role had actually modernized the state (of Gujarat) and made things happen; the question is whether there is too much inertia in the society to make that happen, but they had got a long way to go; Chinese development has not been overnight but is a twenty or more years phenomenon, although in the last ten years it has accelerated, and it has been based on urbanization, rebuilding and infrastructure, and a whole range of other things starting from that; India is still very much an agricultural economy, it is also very slow-moving; they have something like three million elected representatives at national, state, city, village level, so very slow-moving; the other thing is they say by 2030 India will have a larger population than China, but in the Indian context I am not sure it will be positive but I think will be a constraint; India has potential but I haven't seen any evidence that it will reach that potential, I think it is just too complex; one has to admire China for what it has achieved given the size of the problem that faced it
36:15:18 Coming back to the UK, first of all it doesn't mean that I won't be involved with China or any other country; the Chinese companies that I am involved with are becoming more international so a lot of the activities are outside China anyway; Britain is still a very important centre for project finance, for projects all over the world; it is a very important centre for the development of technology, e-commerce, of e-commerce platforms, so there are a lot of opportunities over here; but I think also I am just going through a period where my own life goes through a transition; since 1982 I have been travelling almost constantly and have spent probably a quarter of my time overseas throughout that period; initially it was Japan and Korea, then it was UK and US between 1997-2002, since then, mostly China and to a lesser extent, India, and some other countries as well; I just feel that for whatever reason London is calling; people often say to me if I could think of anywhere in the world where I would want to live, which city would it be; now I have answered my own question having spent a lot of time travelling the world and being involved in other cultures and countries, I see London has great opportunities even today; the whole world is changing and it is a much more dangerous place than since the mid twentieth century; so that is also leading me to make decisions, but we are in a very unstable environment and decisions are being taken by politicians which in retrospect will be seen as irresponsible because the decisions don't meet the objectives they are trying to meet
39:14:20 Why the Cambridge phenomenon occurred is a historical phenomenon; some people say that it is the creative ability of people in Cambridge, the academics and so on, but in fact it was a series of events; I think that one of the first technology companies which set up in the area was Pye which became Phillips and then developed from there; but also there was a series of technology consultancies that were created which were people who had been educated in the university, technologists, or computer scientists, whatever, such as Cambridge Consultants, The Technology Partnership (TTP), Sagentia, and so on; that provided an enormous strength for the whole Cambridge phenomenon; quite a few of the initial spin-outs came out of those bodies; the whole printing value chain from Domino Printing and all those sort of companies came out of Cambridge Consultants; I think that that was the strength that people often forget, the fact that there were these people whose role it was to try and help other companies to commercialize their technologies or develop products based on their technologies or to find technologies that would enable them to produce certain products; that was a very important platform, and I think those companies are still quite important; the University is still quite important but I am not sure that many of the major technology companies created in Cambridge can be directly attributed to the University; also some of the biggest companies are not funded through the traditional routes - angels, venture companies, and so on; for example ARM which is probably the most successful Cambridge company came out of Herman Hauser's Acorn, but was actually spun out as a joint venture with Apple, which people often forget; there are lots of different roots but I think that when you get to a certain level then things start to reinforce each other; the fact there is a cluster of companies in both the electronic sciences as well as in the biosciences means that there are a lot of people coming, being trained within those companies, learning from those companies, who are moving to other companies and therefore help in start-ups; there are entrepreneurs who have sold their companies and are reinvesting in new companies, plus there are some companies that are still very active; I think it is a very complex, historical thing, and now its been created it will remain; there is a certain level of capability which is in terms of both the funding sources, people are now looking to put money into Cambridge companies because they are seeing what has occurred here; there are a lot of people with scientific and technological abilities that are coming out of the University or coming from elsewhere to here because of Cambridge; Cambridge is now a brand, in effect, it is very important in that sense; I think once you get to a certain stage you get a tipping point and Cambridge has long since passed that tipping point and has created something which is sustainable
43:58:14 I think that the main thing I would like to stress again is that my life has not been planned; I know that a lot of scientists have not planned their careers, but quite often when you move into science you stay in that science for the rest of your life; in my own case life has recreated me in different ways and different stages of my career, and I think that important; I also do a lot of entrepreneur mentoring but also get a lot of people wanting me to advise them on careers; it is very difficult because when I was younger I actually believed in planning, that you could plan the future and if you had enough information you could forecast the future; I now realize that you can't do that and I have stopped trying to plan; I try to determine which direction I would like to go in and the parameters around it, but I have no idea where I will be in five years time or ten years time; I am sure if you were doing this interview as a follow-up in five or ten years time you would find that neither of us could anticipate where I have ended up