There may be some honourable exceptions, but if you're looking for the golden age of British design and innovation you can skip the last 60 years, says Design Council chairman Sir George Cox

Cox is no art college aesthete, but someone who views design through the pragmatic eyes of business. A former director-general of the Institute of Directors (1999-2004), he is a qualified aeronautical engineer who spent much of his career in information technology. He was also the author of the 2005 Cox Review of Creativity in Business, commissioned by then-chancellor Gordon Brown.

"The most significant thing about the Review was that it was commissioned in the first place," says Cox. At the 11 Downing Street breakfast where the findings were presented, Sir Terence Conran announced that he had waited 50 years for this. For what, everyone wondered? "To hear the word 'design' used in Downing Street."

For Cox, Conran is one of the heroes of British design, having made it accessible to the average person. The Cox Review reminds us of what it actually does for business. Creativity is the generation of new ideas. Innovation is the exploitation of new ideas. And design links the two, shaping ideas to become useful and attractive for customers. Companies that fail to appreciate the importance of that link will find it much harder to innovate.

Britain, Cox agrees, has never been short on creativity. Indeed, our purely creative industries are world leaders—architecture, the performing arts, fashion and the media. But since the end of the energetic and enterprising Victorian age, we have not been good at exploiting our best ideas. "We are better at selling the recipes than cooking the meals," observes Cox. If we are to remain competitive as a nation, we need to improve our cooking rather urgently. Cox points to the prevailing myth that the UK has successfully migrated from a manufacturing to a service-based economy.

"Developing countries have taken our low-skilled jobs because they are cheaper than us," he says. "We think that's okay, because we'll retain the clean, interesting, high-skilled jobs. But this is totally unrealistic."
India and China want those jobs too, and are putting huge efforts into developing indigenous skills, education, and research and design capacity. "Professional services are now migrating to other countries. We're not going to do anything cheaper than they can. So what are we going to sell?" says Cox.

Besides, we haven't lost quite as much manufacturing as we think we have. Labour-intensive heavy industries such as shipbuilding may have gone east, but the apparently dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs is partly a function of redefinition. As technology, security, transport, catering and cleaning jobs get outsourced, those jobs disappear from manufacturing and crop up in services instead.

"It's getting harder to say which is which," adds Cox. "Apple was a struggling computer company but now, thanks to the iPod, it's part of the entertainment industry. And design, marketing and technology all sit together at Apple—it's only when they do that you get winners," he says.
"When you're building the Eurofighter, how do you classify the people who work on the software, which costs a lot more than bending the aluminium? Manufacturing has got more efficient and employs fewer people, but it's wrong to think of it as yesterday's industry."

Even more importantly, he insists, if a country loses its manufacturing capacity, it will eventually lose its research and design capacity. "You will source from different places, but you can't have design and research totally remote from manufacturing."

People will still pay a premium price for the right goods, Cox continues. Why do they buy a suit made in Italy or Sweden? Not because it's cheaper. "If you have the vision to see what can be different and the balls to do something about it, the world is drowning in opportunity like never before."
He admires Richard Branson for breaking the mould. And he admires James Dyson, who took on the vacuum cleaner industry. Dyson, he points out, didn't study engineering, but art. "The Victorians were polymaths—they didn't put people in boxes. Our higher education needs to give people more breadth, instead of producing engineers who don't understand design, who are packed with knowledge but can't communicate."

One UK sector that walks the innovation walk today is financial services, according to Cox. But which sectors does he think will do it in the next 60 years? Difficult to say, given how many completely new industries keep springing up. But he is confident that government and business now know where they need to go, even if they are still not sure how to get there. "We will hack it," he concludes. "Sufficient people now understand the nature of the change that's required."