Innovation and Management

The Reith Lectures

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.2 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2005

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This year's Reith Lecturer is the distinguished engineer, Lord Broers. He is President of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.

In his third Reith lecture Lord Broers argues that profound changes have taken place in the development of ideas and their translation in to the market place. This innovation revolution demands a new approach to research and product development.

Some argue that technology threatens our way of life and must be controlled through regulation, however, Lord Broers believes that this is rarely necessary. He argues that it is better to allow the market - and the customers - to decide whether technologies succeed or not.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.
0:04.4	This lecture in the series The Triumph of Technology, given by Lord Brewer's, was originally broadcast in 2005.
0:13.6	Good evening and welcome to Manchester University's Business School, where our wreath lecturer Lord Brewer's will tonight be exploring further his theme that technology will determine the future of the human race.
0:26.5	He'll be describing the industrial revolution he believes we underwent in the 1990s and telling us how companies need to be structured,
0:34.7	if they're to play an important role in the global technology market
0:38.5	that now exists. It's a market getting bigger and more competitive by the year, a development
0:44.3	he finds both exciting and concerning. He's a man who knows about the heat in such kitchens.
0:50.5	He spent 20 years working for IBM in the United States before becoming a Cambridge
0:55.3	Professor and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of his alma mater. So he's supremely qualified to talk
1:02.4	about both the role of the academic and the industrialist in the world of technological innovation.
1:08.8	Our host city this evening, Manchester, has, of course, a proud manufacturing and industrial
1:14.2	heritage.
1:15.3	This university business school has, among its antecedents, the Manchester Mechanics Institute
1:20.5	of 1824, when this city was one of the great engines of that other industrial revolution.
1:27.2	Our audience of business entrepreneurs, academics, research scientists and students
1:31.7	will have the opportunity to question Lord Browers after his lecture,
1:35.2	which is this week called Innovation and Management.
1:38.5	Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Alec Browers.
1:50.7	Thank you, Sue, and good evening.
1:54.4	When Ralph Waldo Emerson
1:56.1	reputedly and memorably said
1:59.0	that the world would beat a path to the door of the person who made a better mouse trap,
	...

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