The Real World

Yesterday I paid a visit to a manufacturing company in the West Midlands. I got to hear the story of how  they almost went to the wall in 2008. How they have diversified their interests to protect against over reliance on a single income stream, and how the commercial medical market is a strong earner, once you can get over the hurdles of approval. They have a mixture of modern production facilities that can produce millions of widgets per year, and very old hydraulic presses with manual operatives. Its not sexy work. But they are providing work for over a hundred people and they need to involve innovation to remian competitive with companies from eastern Europe and the far east.
We met at a workshop I was giving to introduce people  and businesses to photonic technology. It was this that led them to think if photonic approaches could offer a new way of tackling some of the problems they come across. Generally these problems involved metrology of some sort. Avoiding costly errors of production is crucial as small mistakes in a few items can have big consequences to their customers and end up costing them significant sums in compensation and wastage. Yet much of the checking is still done by people who will tend to make mistakes.
This company needs people to help with innovation but they cant recruit anywhere near the number of graduates they need, becasue as I said earlier its not sexy. In this manufacturing engineering they estimated there were 100 jobs for every 10 graduates, and a massive skill shortage. Having spent time there and walked around the factory, and observed the daily grind, I left thinking that all academics should be made to experience this. Firstly it would make them realise how lucky they are to work in an academic environment. Second it might help them to realise what is needed to translate their work done in a lab into a working product that someone else might use. Currently there is an enormous gulf between  someones concept of how an idea could be used and what is required to make it happen.