Member Article

'UK needs National Inventor's Day'

The British Inventor’s Society and British Association of Women Entrepreneurs are backing a campaign to officially celebrate UK inventors, amongst fears that despite UK design and innovation are not adequately supported. Germany, Austria and Switzerland celebrate inventors on November 9, the USA on February 11, the birthday of Thomas Edison, who had over 1,000 patents, and Argentina’s day is on September 29 - the birthday of ballpoint pen inventor, László József Bíró. UK-based company Linshell Innovations is proposing that the UK’s day should be today, the 2nd of August.Andrew Self, President of the British Inventor’s Society and prolific inventor and engineer said: “This country’s natural resource is not minerals or cheap labour, it’s our indigenous ingenuity. The amount of inventiveness in the UK is phenomenal; the difficulty is that we are bad at supporting those who wish to turn their incredible ideas into credible products. Skype, the jet engine and the metal airframe, innovations that have allowed mankind to communicate and travel freely around the world, were developed by non-university based innovators (Zennström & Friis, Whittle and Mitchell) to meet needs-driven requirements, using a combination of existing knowledge to support a considerable amount of ingenuity and entrepreneurship.“The question is, can the wealth of a nation benefit more from innovation resulting from a small well-funded body of elite researchers or from lay innovators being backed by university academics and their resource base? The answer is both. World beating products come from both basic research and from lone inventors, just like the steam engine that preceded the academic study of thermodynamics.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .