When I attended secondary school I was mad about aeroplanes; over time that became infused with my stepfather's (past) interest in tuning racing cars and became a fascination with aero engines. I wrote to all the manufacturers begging for information and through being curious and asking questions got to be a regular correspondant with Mike Evans, who was Public Relations Officer at Rolls-Royce. In 1962 I joined R-R as an engineering apprentice. A year later I did a stint in Mike's office and helped him by collecting data and information for the company submission for the Feilden Report on Engineering Design, 1963 that he was writing. I remember that we were making the case for more investment in engineering education and engineering design education in particular on the grounds that the added value of high-skill high knowledge industries is very important to the wellbeing of the UK.
In a recent interview, chief executive of Rolls-Royce [aero-engines] Sir John Rose said, “There are only three ways of creating wealth. You dig it up, grow it, or convert it to add value, anything else is merely moving it about. In a high-wage economy you must focus on high converted-value activities. To achieve high converted value you need good education and differentiating skills.”
He also made the point that they cannot recruit sufficient highly qualified people in the UK and have to look globally for talent, which has pluses and minuses.
Seth Godin reminded me of my early encounter with the power of high-skill, high value- added design driven experience in his blog "Digging it out of the ground" where he writes "Six years ago, in Unleashing the Ideavirus, I wrote, "Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (iron ore or oil) into something you could hold." This statement was a little hyperbolic, but not by much. " He then lists the value add of various industries (Aerospace and Defence are at the top) writing "Teena did some research and sent me numbers on the current state of the list. I sorted it by "Hold" stuff (like a can of Coke) and thought-value added businesses (like computers, pharma or stores). "
I think the division is out dated because for instance Rolls-Royce sell 'hours per dollar per day' not engines, computer stores a schizophrenic and do not know whether to sell me reliable task support or a computer and so on; an iPod is not an mp3 player. Even the concrete just delivered next door is about fulfilling a dream not 3 tonnes of readymix.
Makes me think about brands as lovemarks. Maybe there is something about tangible outcomes going on here and some enterprises have physical expressions that anticipate and represent the experience, whilst others are just experiences without physical affordances to remind you of how great they are. ??
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