James Dyson (of "sucks like a Dyson" vacuum cleaner fame) has a great piece in the Guardian calling on engineers to make Britain great again. In it he talks about how we all need to start making stuff again. Or as he puts it:

We need to rediscover that fascination with that train set of our childhood. We've built our modern economy on the service sector, loans, banking and the dotcom bubble. Now that's collapsed, we should seek to base it on something long term with solid foundations. If we don't, we risk losing an already weakened position for good. Making money from money should be replaced with making money from making.

As I've been looking at the profile of a number of different businesses inside of HP lately, I've been struck by how much profitability in almost always directly correlated with how much product invention the business happens to do. A long list of IP assignments in a given market is almost always a predictor of a very profitable business while all the PR, transactions, and buzz in the world can't keep a business very far from "banana handler" profits.

A great compliment to the new president's insistence that we need to bring the makers back to the center of this story.