Radical Potter

"I like reading history because when you’re researching technological change and innovation, as I do, there’s not a lot of non-historical data to go on. You have to look at the examples that we have from the past. This is a biography of Josiah Wedgwood. What’s interesting about it is the way it illustrates how you integrate basic research into manufacturing. He did lots of experiments about how glazes worked, what temperatures were needed, what kinds of clay gave you which different kinds of effects and so on. There are some beautiful illustrations of the kind of samples he created. It was basic research, but the book also shows the way that interacts with the manufacturing process, understanding the skills of the people who are actually loading the kilns and handling the pots. Then, further, the integration of what he could produce using these new techniques and styles with marketing. Marketing led to the importance of the designs of the different tea services and vases that he was creating. He sent free gifts to famous people, to influencers such as royalty, who would then help create the middle-class market for his goods. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It was clearly a time when the Industrial Revolution was making a lot of middle-class people better off and they could start to think about affording luxuries, like a different tea service with a new pattern. But it’s that whole process of vertical integration—from basic research and digging up different kinds of clay on expeditions, through to a real attention to the detail of the design and the marketing and how you created that mass market—that has been taken out of a lot of modern manufacturing by global supply chains. Different stages get done in different places now. There are lots of companies that have outsourced manufacturing to Southeast Asian countries or are trying to. With hindsight, that looks like a mistake in terms of national policy. It might be fine for the companies themselves if they save money in the short-term. But that deep knowledge of how you innovate in the light of the manufacturing techniques you’re going to have to use—I think that’s something really valuable that’s been lost, and it was one of the things that really leapt out of this book. Since the 1980s, when globalisation started to take off. Trade liberalisation made it possible and information and communication technologies made it seem easy to have these very extended global supply chains. So it’s been relatively recent. But a lot of British companies lost their way with spending on R&D earlier. We’re not very innovative. The number of companies that say they do R&D in the UK is pretty low. I remember a TV series called Troubleshooter , presented by Sir John Harvey-Jones. He was a famous businessman, very successful. He used to go to failing businesses to ask them what was going wrong. Could he help give them some advice? And he actually went to one of the pottery companies in Stoke-on-Trent. They had, in effect, stopped spending on the design part, the R&D, to cut costs in the face of overseas competition. So they had lost that magic source that made Wedgwood and other British pottery companies so successful in the first place. That was, essentially, his diagnosis in the TV programme. The book illustrates how important the research and innovation was."