“I can’t stand plagiarism, the consumer has everything to lose”: interview with James Dyson

I don’t like to give advice, because you never know what the future has in store for us. That said, I would tell him never to give up. Even when the path is long, hard, that we are very close to abandon, we must continue to believe it. I would even say that it is when you are at the bottom of the hole that you have to redouble their efforts. You know, I built 5126 prototypes of my first bagless vacuum cleaner, and it was only at 5127ᵉ test that I knew that it would be a success. Throughout this process, I never knew if it was going to work. So you should never let go, never give up.

However, I have the impression that today it is a little easier to innovate. In my time, before you could sell a new product, you had to be a big company to advertise television, for example. This is no longer the case today thanks to crowdfunding(Editor’s note, crowdfunding). We can raise funds quite easily, because people are more numerous, so the sums to be engaged individually less important and the investments necessarily less risky. Yes, technologies have evolved and are more complex to master, but you can buy easily printed circuits, go through software for the most complicated tasks, etc.

It is a passion. When I was young, I lived in the countryside. As soon as I had enough money for that, I bought a farm. From that moment, many farmers have offered to buy their properties and today we have 38,000 acres (Editor’s note, around 19,500 hectares). It is not for money, it is not a commercial operation, but agriculture is worth being studied, because it encompasses many disciplines. We try to bring technology in the fields to, for example, produce tasty strawberries all year round and responsible. We study the impact of light and ultraviolet on plants, robots collect harvests. We can also enhance agricultural waste to make gas in order to produce electricity and thus power green greenhouses.