James Dyson Quotes

Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers - half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven't learned - or been told - what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.

There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.

If you didn't have patents, no one would bother to spend money on research and development. But with patents, if someone has a good idea and a competitor can't copy it, then that competitor will have to think of their own way of doing it. So then, instead of just one innovator, you have two or three people trying to do something in a new way.

The key to success is failure ... Success is made of 99 percent failure.

Goodness, I know nothing about nuclear energy.

China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.

Life is a mountain of solvable problems, and I enjoy that.

Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.

Fear is always a good motivator.

Insurance companies don't make anything.

Well, I'm rather attracted to rather prosaic things like vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. Where people haven't apparently made them with a great love for what they're doing.

[M]anufacturing, science and engineering are ... incredibly creative. I'd venture to say more so than creative advertising agencies and things that are known as the creative industries.

I don't particularly follow the Bauhaus school of design, where you make everything into a black box - simplify it.

It's the unlikely juxtaposition of creativity and logic which causes the wooliness and confusion around the term 'innovation'. Everybody wants to be innovative; many companies and ideas are proclaimed to be innovative and no one doubts that innovation is a money spinner. And, thus, we are all looking for the magic formula. Well, here you go: Creativity + Iterative Development = Innovation.

The way the world is going, it's technology driven. And it isn't just driven by the old super powers, it's driven by the far east and new emerging economies.

I'm not a businessman.

Cordless vacuums are designed for quick jobs, but you need enough power to do the job; you don't want the power waning over time.

Reality TV is anything but.

Some of the best inventive moments are born out of 'wrong thinking'. Most people start with the right way so they all follow the same path. The wrong way will lead to mistakes from which you can learn and create new discoveries-the kind of original ideas that come to life when we dare to be different, keep an open mind, and have no fear of failure.

If you really want to improve technology, if you want things to work better and be better, you've got to protect the person who spends a lot of effort, money, and time developing that new technology.

You don't get inspiration sitting at a drawing board or in front of your computer.

Everybody recognizes that if you can make very efficient electric motors, you can make a quantum leap forward.

My interest in film is sort of catholic - apart from science fiction and horror movies, I'll watch almost everything.

The computer dictates how you do something, whereas with a pencil you're totally free.

You need a stubborn belief in an idea in order to see it realised.

I've fought court battles over my inventions before.

Children want the challenge of difficult tasks - just look how much better they are than their parents on a computer.

I don't do something necessarily to make a big profit or because it's a logical business decision.

Some people are academically inclined, some vocationally and we shouldn't penalise the latter.

People buy products if they're better.

It is an extreme perversion of capitalism if you can trade in something before you have even paid for it.

Business is constantly changing, constantly evolving.

I imported the first Mac into England in 1984; you know, the beige box. I imported what I think were the first four that came into England. I never opened the instruction manual. That was the best thing about it.

Nobody wants the expenditure of a lease on a factory which lasts 21 years. You can't plan 21 years ahead.

The important thing is to learn from mistakes - something graduates are adept at. Our graduate engineers are working on new technology - from uncharted applications for our digital motor, to a new take on the hand dryer. With an unhindered mind, nothing is off limits.

Don't listen to experts.

When I started off, I was working in a shed behind my house. All I had was a drill, an electric drill. That was the only machine I had.

What I've learned from running is that the time to push hard is when you're hurting like crazy and you want to give up. Success is often just around the corner.

Failure is an enigma. You worry about it, and it teaches you something.

Well, air-conditioning is not a good thing.

Companies are not ingenious, it's the people in them that are.

Anger is a good motivator.

There's nothing wrong with things taking time.

A lot of people give up when the world seems to be against them, but that's the point when you should push a little harder. I use the analogy of running a race. It seems as though you can't carry on, but if you just get through the pain barrier, you'll see the end and be okay. Often, just around the corner is where the solution will happen.

I think if you have to pay for your education, you worry very seriously about you're going to do when you've got your degree.

If you want to do something different, you're going to come up against a lot of naysayers.

I own every share of my company, and I don't want to sell any of it.

I don't believe in brands.

We have to change our culture so you can create wealth from making things and don't just try to make money out of money.

I just think things should work properly

If you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.

When decisions on nuclear power stations and runways are delayed and the government dilly-dallies, people think they aren't important.

Most robotic vacuum cleaners don't see their environment, have little suction, and don't clean properly. They are gimmicks. We've been developing a unique 360 vision system that lets our robot see where it is, where it has been, and where it is yet to clean. Vision, combined with our high speed digital motor and cyclone technology, is the key to achieving a high performing robot vacuum - a genuine labor saving device.

I grew up running miles of the Norfolk coastline. I'd think nothing of a six-mile run before breakfast. I still run, though not as far and not before muesli.

If robots are to clean our homes, they'll have to do it better than a person.

People will make leaps of faith and get excited by your product if you just get it in front of them.

Now, we don't teach children in schools to be creative. We don't teach them to experiment. We want them to fill in the right answer, tick the right answer in the box.

Engineers are behind the cars we drive, the pills we pop and the way we power our homes.

Everyone has ideas. They may be too busy or lack the confidence or technical ability to carry them out. But I want to carry them out. It is a matter of getting up and doing it.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

As an engineer I'm constantly spotting problems and plotting how to solve them.

An inventor's path is chorused with groans, riddled with fist-banging and punctuated by head scratches.

In order to fix it, you need a passionate anger about something that doesn't work well.

The U.S. is the biggest investor in research and development in the world. It has the best universities. Keeping them supplied with the best talent is essential.

When you can't compete on cost, compete on quality.

Arbitrary benchmarks cheat kids out of a fulfilling education.

At school, I enjoyed playing the bassoon. I was in the orchestra and played the melody when the other boys sang hymns at prayers time.

Everyone gets knocked back, no one rises smoothly to the top without hindrance. The ones who succeed are those who say, right, let's give it another go.

I don't design down to a price.

The Web is fascinating and transformative, but it's an easy, flashy, get-rich-quick option to the hard graft of proper industry.

I've obviously used fans - I wouldn't say all my life, because we couldn't afford them when I was young, but from my 20s and onwards we've had to use fans. And I've always loathed them. Everything about them. The way you adjust them, getting them at the angle you want. Carrying them. Cleaning them. The danger of putting your finger in them.

As a modern employer you have to treat people well.

Anyone developing new products and new technology needs one characteristic above all else: hope.

What I often do is just think of a completely obtuse thing to do, almost the wrong thing to do. That often works because you start a different approach, something no one has tried.

I learned that the moment you want to slow down is the moment you should accelerate.

We should learn to live more with our climate and rely less on electricity to alter our climate.

I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

[In my home workshop,] generally I'm mending things, which is interesting because you learn a lot about why they broke.

In the digital age of 'overnight' success stories such as Facebook, the hard slog is easily overlooked.

I just want things to work properly.

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.

The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You never learn from success.

Beauty can come in strange forms.

One of the most fun inventions of my lifetime is the Mini.