Bill Jones had led business in over 100 countries. He started in the computing side of IT in the steel industry, using one of the first commercial computers, a LEO, at the Corby steelworks. He moved to the supplier side with Plessey and then into telecommunications and networking. He is now a venture capitalist and an author.
His book, Mindwealth, is the first book to attempt a holistic approach to the relationship between Intellectual Property and wealth.
William Arthur Jones (Bill), was born in 1947. The family lived in Rhoscolyn on the southern tip of Holy Island off Anglesey. Bill’s father, having retired from the merchant navy after the war, was a truant officer. His mother was a housewife. His parents were keen on education, this was influenced by his mother’s experience as Bill explains: “My mother had been orphaned from her mother at the age of 18 months and was brought up by her sisters. She had passed highest in the county twice for eleven-plus. She commuted to the grammar school in Llangefni where they stayed at a café for the week, paying for it with butter and eggs from the family farm, but after O levels she retired back to the farm. Two or three of her fellow pupils in the same form, went up to Oxford and taught me back at the school afterwards.” Bill’s upbringing was in a rural environment, he explains: “There was an industrial site in Llangefni, which was the administrative town for the county, but our lives were basically music and literature and Urdd Eisteddfod (cultural festival), rugby and farming. I spent a lot of time in farms. At weekends and other times, I worked in an abattoir, as a butcher’s boy, in hotels and restaurants, carriage cleaner and porter with British Rail at Holyhead port, went off to Liverpool in round trips of 180 miles to buy fruit and veg from the docks, bring them back, and sell them round the council house estates. All sorts of jobs.” Early Life
Bill went to the newly-built Llangefni Comprehensive, which he says “was the first purpose-built, state-of-the-art, truly comprehensive school in the country” as the entire island went wholly comprehensive in a notable political and educational experiment – there were no grammars. The grammar school traditions were destroyed. Bill enjoyed his school years tremendously in the top grammar stream and was House Captain and Prefect. Bill’s first language is Welsh, he learned English at secondary school and adds that he did not do well in his university exams on two questions because he did not understand the language. Since then up to 50,000 new words have been added to the English language when the average daily usage is only a fraction of that. A significant part of which is due to the evolving IT world. At school Bill had ambitions to be a doctor and was advised by his headmaster to take physics, chemistry and mathematics at A level for the first two years and then take biology in the third year. Having passed mathematics and biology O levels a year early, and further maths in his O level year, Bill explains that within four weeks of starting Pure and Applied A level maths his teacher suffered a brain haemorrhage and the class of four were then taught by the Pure Maths teacher who did nothing but supply practice papers. He adds: “We got practice questions every so often from another maths master whom we never saw. So maths for me was largely self-taught; there was no PAM A level maths teaching.” This set a trend for the rest of his life. He explains: “I can refer to other periods where I’ve actually gone into a position where no one’s given me any tasks or objectives, just told me to get on with it, and because of the change of technologies, you’ve had to educate yourself sufficiently in new computer languages, in new technologies, and I’ve been exposed to those in a vast array. I’ve been exceptionally fortunate in the stuff I’ve been exposed to.” He describes his thirst for education more as “a curiosity”, adding: “One is simply a product in a market, and what one has to have are the right attributes for that market. I’m like a pot of jam that’s got to have the right label, be placed on the shelf and when you’ve got the right labels people will buy it. I did an MBA in finance at Cranfield and I can remember two or three interviews subsequently where the interviewer asked if I could read a balance sheet; that taught me that actually I had to qualify as an accountant as well.” Having been advised by his headmaster to apply for university in case he changed his mind about medicine, and then being offered places at 6 English universities, he was advised to accept one because university places were rare and he might not get a second chance. In 1965, Bill went to Sheffield University which only had 5000 students at the time compared with 30,000 today, and studied for a degree in metallurgy, graduating in 1968. Sheffield had the leading, largest and best resourced course in the country as a result of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s “white heat of technology” initiative to which many went in preference to Oxbridge. He says: “I took metallurgy because it wasn’t pure physics, pure maths or pure chemistry, I wanted a combination of them.” At Sheffield Bill also learned BASIC and Fortran writing programs for a batch machine. Education
Bill joined British Steel as a management trainee through the university milk round and after his experience of working at their Scunthorpe base. He was located in Corby the largest integrated steel and tube works in Europe and the third largest in the world with four blast furnaces. Bill says there was a large community feel and the culture was heavily influenced by unions. He adds that he was “leant upon quite heavily to join the unions”, adding: “This was a one-horse town, everybody knew each other, it was a huge site. There was a blast furnace at one end, all the way down to tubes at the other end, probably a couple of miles in size or more, and the large iron ore mines beyond. There was a lot of ‘home’ working going on; cars being repaired behind the sheds, the chief engineer was also running an engineering business off site, and all sorts of other shenanigans going on.” Despite thoroughly enjoying it, Bill terminated his six-month management trainee scheme after three months, explaining; “I really wasn’t learning much in any of the places I was seeing, but I can now see the relevance of what they were doing. I joined the cold drawn stainless plant, reporting to the plant manager there, who had regrettably lost his son in a motorbike accident just a couple of months earlier and had holed himself up in his office and didn’t come out; it naturally hit him pretty hard. So, I was left a little bit to my own devices, being guided by the assistant plant manager and so I took responsibility for heat treatment there. There were two batch furnaces, two roller hearths and they had one-size-fits-all heat treatments for individual specifications of steel to get the requisite properties of the tubes they’re after. These tubes went into the power stations, Hinkley, Dungeness B, and as casings into the oil industry in the North Sea.” In 1969, Bill was sent on a three-month junior executive exchange to Düsseldorf and in 1970, he became assistant plant manager. He instigated and led two transformational projects as he explains: “In the cold drawn and stainless plant, where you basically pull these tubes (draw) for applications in power stations, the one-size-fits-all heat treatment was giving very low yields; 60%.” Having read in United States Steel’s “The making, shaping and treating of steel”, that the properties of casts of particular kinds of stainless naturally changed as more components such as nickel, chromium, etc were added, Bill decided to take action. He continues: “I arranged to get the specific cast composition sent on a daily basis using Lamson pneumatic tubes over 2 miles (mechanical data networks!) from the furnaces and gave them directly to the chargehands who then calculated to a formula that I’d created that set what the heat treatment should be and at what temperature. They used state of the art rather primitive four function electronic calculators by today’s standards, before the time when pocket-sized programmable calculators came into being a few years later. This was the era of desktop telephones, telex, Lamson tubes and simple calculators before mobile phones and pocket calculators came into being. Faxes were just coming in. There was a computer in a block a mile and a half away which the local fire service kept cool during the summer by hosing the windows. That was the Information Technology and systems of the time. Quality control were a little bit upset by this, but the yields went up from 60% to 90% which dramatically changed financial performance. I didn’t seek permission to do it, I just did it and it actually worked. That was one transformational development, giving the chargehands responsibilities to use electrical calculators for cast-specific heat treatment. Today one would term that process reengineering and empowerment. I didn’t think in those terms then” The second project in another plant involved computing and was developed at the time of the UK’s power shutdowns which saw the plant regularly shut down and leaving employees with nothing to do. At this time Bill was living at a hall of residence called Graham House. He says: “I now understand how formative that was because some of those students went to work in the computer department, others went to work in the R&D department. I was one of the very few on the management training ladder, but outside the work we were interacting with each other.” One of Bill’s good friends was Mike Thompson, a programmer on the LEO computer. After being sent on a management day release to do a diploma in management studies where he learnt about statistics, mass of data projects (now termed big data) and how to program in COBOL, Bill was struck by an idea which he discussed with Mike over a pint. He explains: “I asked him if we could get all the quality control data coded up, put them on punch cards, put them into the LEO machine, and get some understanding of how the relationships existed between the chemical composition and the degree of work and, the problems that we were getting in quality control. That’s how it started. I didn’t seek any permission from anybody, I didn’t seek a budget. People were twiddling their fingers and I just asked the foremen and chargehands if they’d be good enough to go through their last five years of quality control data, and code it all up which created the coding sheets. They were big plants with large volume throughput which meant a large volume of records. Those people were brilliant, they were so good to me, and I got these out to Mike who started to code them up as skunk works and put them into the machine (the LEO II at Corby which was the first commercially sold business computer for business applications in the world).” The first LEO II was used internally by J Lyons, its producer, the second was sold to Ford but never commissioned, and so the third was sold to British Steel Corby and used commercially which was therefore the first commercially sold business computer for business applications in the world. The program was eventually rewritten for an IBM 360 which replaced the LEO II. Bill presented the results to the quarterly management / R&D review meeting which suggested that a significant part of the 450 strong R&D department’s state-of-the-art microscopy and chemical analysis approach was misplaced. The solution lay in changing processes and making them more cast-specific. Had he had guidance on writing it up it would have merited a PhD. Having passed the Princeton Test to enter Harvard’s 2-year MBA course, Bill left British Steel in 1972 to undertake a lower-cost one year business course at Cranfield which had more taught hours than Harvard’s two-year course. He says the experience exposed to him to a new set of people with different ideas and views on life. “I met an awful lot of people who’d never been north of Watford who were thinking in terms of finance, investment, accounting, qualified accountancy etc. people who wanted to go into marketing in fast moving consumer goods marketing environments. People looked at the world in a very, very different way from the one that I had experienced and it gave me a completely new vocabulary, new way of looking at things, and it was wonderful.” Summer work
British Steel
This was before Microsoft was formed in 1975, Apple was formed in 1976, Google was formed in 1998 and Facebook formed in 2004
Having graduated in the top 5% and eschewing the available path from Cranfield into Harvard’s second year, after Cranfield, Bill joined the Finance Department of the global Engineering Group in Rank Xerox’s international organisation in the UK as a financial analyst based in Euston Road, London . He says: “I’d been in a nationalised steel industry and I wanted to counter that with the best American marketing environment that I could find. Rank Xerox was top class American management methodology, marketing capabilities, etc.” Bill quickly moved from the Engineering Group to the Financial Planning and Control department of the International Corporate Headquarters. He says: “One of my jobs was to organise the sale of the R&D assets back to Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, California. That gave me exposure to Xerox PARC in the States and all that was going on there and the technology that was transferred across.” Bill adds: “When I left Rank Xerox my last role was internal audit implementation on a global basis. This involved looking at the audit reports of the computer, IT and operational systems of the 26 operating subsidiaries and manufacturing and engineering entities, and ensuring that the issues that had been identified, had been implemented locally in places as far afield as New Zealand and Nigeria and wherever. I now discover that I was monitoring one division led by a former leader of LEO II !” Rank Xerox
In 1976, Bill moved to Carrington Viyella, a textile company, where he was assigned by the main board to lead one of the largest division’s 5 site IT department. Bill explains: “My task was threefold. One was to go in and develop a new information system for the division. The second was to select a new computer system for the division. Thirdly to look at and implement a new process control technology for the division. The reality for Carrington Viyella’ s division then was that you basically made your profit in the last hour on a Saturday night. You also made your profit by bullying the sellers of the yarn, to take them down a penny or two per kilo, and you reduced the surplus stock by going to Marks & Spencer’s in Baker Street every Thursday to see what colours were being bought by the shoppers there and to go back to the factory and tell the factory what kind of cloth to produce and what kind of colour to produce the following week. Another part of the business was selling velour seats to Jaguar Land Rover / British Leyland which was based on colours as well.” In selecting the computer system, Bill says: “I went into a requirements planning process using Hoskyns. We had a Honeywell in place at the time. The logical conclusion was that we would go to Honeywell. However, politics cut across that and said it should actually be a British ICL. I left before it was implemented. I also chose Dextralog, which was the new ground-breaking textile shop-floor process-control computer system and that was very interesting in its own way because that was a brand-new process-control capability. It sparked a revolution in how we use computers to make decisions. Dextralog used early computer technology to gather real-time data about how a weaving mill’s looms were performing. Setting standards in machine monitoring, Dextralog showed computers could transform data gathering and decision making. I developed the information systems which, regrettably, was to Rank Xerox’s and B-School’s sophistication of information systems and which the Carrington-Viyella management could not assimilate. It looked at their world in a different way.” It crystallised the company’s thinking on the challenges they were trying to solve and the role of information systems and IT in that. Carrington Viyella
Bill next moved to Plessey – a FTSE company – after being headhunted by the company. He says: “The first offer of a job was to go round the world explaining the asset management charging system to various subsidiaries. The name of the game in Plessey was to bring down the inventories, bring down the assets and create cash out of that environment. I wasn’t comfortable with that solitary global role. Instead, I was given the role of working for the Deputy Chairman Michael Clark and ultimately for the Clark Brothers.” Bill says he learned a huge amount by working for them. He adds: “Michael and John Clark were excellent to me, absolutely brilliant. Michael taught me a huge amount. He was so perceptive on his role in the company as the deputy chairman to his brother John Clark. John Clark’s involvement was very different, and so working with the two of them in the C-Suite was wonderful.” He was an observer on the plc and subsidiary boards, worked on the decision to sell the 25% stake in ICL and the Hoskyns stake, whilst the iron magnetic-core memory exit was being completed. He undertook strategic reviews of the bubble memory, holographic memory, secure fault-tolerant multiprocessor computer. He was appointed CEO of Plessey Germany, Austria and Switzerland (with Eastern European activities) based in Munich – a technology / IT conglomerate of 14 subsidiaries which he turned around from significant loss into profit, and where he led the establishment of the first Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Design facility, and the first library, retail and manufacturing (Mercedes) barcode systems in Germany using the more efficient Plessey barcode; turned around the data systems, and the Plessey Peripheral Systems businesses covering PDP/11 controllers, memory cards and 0.5Mb disc drives (selling for $5000) division; and defence and telecoms systems businesses. He made frequent trips to Silicon Valley suppliers to discuss their future IT product strategy and engaged with Japanese vendors who supplied the Visual Display Units (VDU’s) Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) leading edge VT100 desk top terminals. He returned to the UK to lead Plessey telecoms’ office systems business in Europe covering the distribution and new market activities which entailed negotiating acquisitions and joint ventures (Olivetti, Matra, AEG Telefunken, Barco etc), including leading the business that gave Nokia its initial mobile digital switching technology (CDSS). Asked about what happened to Plessey, Bill says: “The straight answer is insufficient revenues to cover the cost base.” He continues by explaining about the role of the government’s industrial strategy in which Plessey was involved and the work he was involved in with the National Economic Development Office (NEDO). He adds: “The National Economic Development Office considered things very carefully. The scientists and engineers we were working with knew what was going on in the marketplace outside. They read widely, they knew what was going on in the States, they shared that information with other technologists. We knew what was going on in Europe. Plessey was a very important part of the industrial strategy at the time. The defence piece was clearly subject to defence constraints, but it was doing all the right thing in radars, sonars, tactical communications, command and control information systems, Ptarmigan, etc. Semiconductors, optoelectronics and passive components were subject to international volume pressures and so the focus was on market niches, standards and technical excellence from the world-renowned Plessey Caswell research centre. On the telecoms side, the digital switching, System X and other products were selling into BT and resellers, and similar customers in other countries. The joint venture which was negotiated between Plessey and GEC in telecoms was, regrettably, the death knell of Plessey. GEC controlled the balance sheet which crystallised when the GEC / Siemens bid was successful” Plessey
Bill went on to work extensively within telecommunications, data services, value added services and voice holding positions such as Telecommunications Industry Leader
Other IT Activities
In 1992, against the background of the dissolution of the Soviet Union with tanks on the streets, little in the shops, snaking queues everywhere, but top end restaurants thriving, Bill negotiated and co-founded SOVAM. He explains: “Cable & Wireless wanted the data girdle around the earth and the best way to do that was via fibre through Russia. Internet technology had been around for quite some time which he’d been involved with in the mid 80’s when he led the majority of Motorola’s EMEA Information Systems Group multi-user computers business using UNIX / TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol suite from the Packet Switched Network from ARPANET the predecessor of the Internet ), and they (SFMT Russia / Russian Academy of Sciences) were looking for a global long-distance data services business to be involved in bringing them into the modern communications / IT world, which was Cable & Wireless, and so he spent a long time in Moscow negotiating that transaction, concluding it, and then becoming responsible for it. SOVAM developed a global, packet data services (X.25) offering integrating Russia into the globe (San Francisco, New York, London, Brussels, Hong Kong) and the first public internet service into and within Russia; there was none before. “Then there was SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) international interbank messaging network, with which he’d been involved with in Brussels in 1978 when it was getting underway and Logica were involved with it.” “SOVAM became the first SWIFT node in Russia.” integrating Russia into the global banking network allowing funds to move freely in and out of the country which was previously nigh on impossible. One could get funds in with difficulty but the foreign correspondent bank didn’t have the reserves and couldn’t transmit funds out. SOVAM also created the first electronic commodity and stock trading (equity etc) exchanges in Russia. They’d built a large wooden room in Moscow full of trading desks for these instruments, but they couldn’t populate it with computers, nor indeed with the data services to make it work.” SOVAM also participated in some mobile networks which became part of VimpelCom. Bill helped to form and co-found the limited company that ran it which included Soros, Halcyon, SFMT, Russian Academy of Sciences and others. He adds: “I spent a lot of time in Moscow going in and out of the Kremlin and dealing with some very interesting people and we put into place branded international data services and for the 21 cities of over a million people in Russia, bringing Russia into the modern 20th century. Other times we were in San Francisco which the Russians enjoyed enormously, New York or Hong Kong. The Russians were so grateful for the initiatives” He appointed a young English lady and data services expert as General Manager in Moscow to integrate SOVAM into the global data services offering. She drove there from London in her new company Land Rover. SOVAM
“We are in a remarkable position in this country that we can do so many things. We’ve been part of Horizon 2020 – the EU’s R&D program – and I was an adviser on the internet and SME’s on that. My experience from that is that the science and technology occurs here and then on the other side, some of the programme management and sharing of knowledge occurs in mainland Europe. So, it’s making sure that we can use the technology we have here by getting it out into the marketplace and distributing it. It’s about the business model. It’s substituting capital expenditure and operational expenditure and matching that against the revenue.” He invests in a number of different businesses, including a company which he says “could transform the government’s IT real estate by dramatically reducing the amount of money it spends on that IT real estate and change the way in which programmes are being managed and implemented”. Another business is working with Microsoft to deliver a more secure environment which Bill says is hugely transformative for the world as a half billion people use Windows 10 currently. One automated legal processes; another trawls the web for IP infringements and takes them down. He explains: “Mercury Communications, when I joined it, was addressing essentially the business park environment and it started to move into consumers. There was a change of management which didn’t quite work and then the next change of management didn’t work and then there was the next change of management, which identified correctly that going after consumer markets was very expensive at the time. So, it was strictly a piece of strategy. The consumer piece was sold off, the cable network part was sold off and then the internet came along. “Cable & Wireless hit the dotcom crunch as it was undertaking a digital transformation, and it is the only long-distance telecoms company to have survived that era without having had recourse to dilutive new financing and capital raising, etc, because the management managed the balance sheet and cashflow exceptionally well and outperformed its peer group. So comparatively, it didn’t lose as much value for shareholders as other telecoms businesses. But souring institutional investor sentiment to the industry and the brand, against the background of seeking attribution for their own funds poor performances during the dotcom crash took its toll. Most institutional investors were seeking certainty post dotcom crash against the backdrop of huge uncertainty due to the rapid growth of the internet. “GEC was a different animal from Plessey. GEC was a very cost conscious and not such a technology heartland as Plessey was. The management style was different. For GEC it was essentially a cost-plus activity and the market moved away from that. They were wrong-footed by technological evolution as I found out when advising the board. Plessey were developing lots of new technologies and because they were tied in with GEC which had a different philosophy, it hampered them going forward. It’s all about culture, management and understanding your markets, and organising your businesses correctly for the market.” He continues looking at the difference between UK and the rest of the world in terms of the UK’s ability to create large technology companies. He refers to the companies such as Cable and Wireless, Plessey, GEC and Mercury, saying: “Accounting and investment theory has a lot to play because we were organising our P&L and cashflows on a subsidiary basis, on a territorial geographic basis, whereas in fact the value of those businesses, particularly Plessey, was its distribution channels globally. It had the ability to take products internationally, developed at huge cost. So the business model is an important one. So also are the policy and regulatory backdrops which have served to weaken UK plc” Referring to Facebook and similar companies that have arisen from the dotcom crash, he adds: “I have said it publicly that I do not believe that those kinds of companies could emerge in the UK with our existing governance structures.” Bill believes that what the UK needs “are governance structures that look forward for growth businesses. What’s happened at BT between Jansen and du Plessis is very illuminating for this. The board was taking an awful long time to discuss strategy when it didn’t need to do that. In California you wouldn’t do that. You would not spend the amount of time the boards in the UK did discussing strategy, they’d just get on with it. In fact, in a lot of technology businesses I’ve been involved with, the strategy is developed by the product developers and the technologists. They can see the market opportunity, they try things. The important thing is they try things and if it doesn’t work, they drop it and move on to the next one.” “It’s that propensity to take the risk and fail and if it doesn’t work, move on, because the ten times benefit of getting it right outweighs the one times cost of failing. In the UK, we believe in the process, we institutionalise the process and are unable to break the process.” Angel Investor
The UK’s electrical engineering sector
Asked about mistakes he has made, Bill says: “I don’t think I can say mistake, because each one forces a change and forces you to think about things and each one is a learning opportunity. It hasn’t all been easy, but I wouldn’t say mistake. I have been extremely fortunate, extremely lucky. I’ve met some fabulous people. Each and every one of them has taught me something in different ways. “The reality of management training is that you actually tend to look at your life in a different way. The Americans don’t look at the world in terms of mistakes, they look at the world in terms of learning opportunities. “To go forward in your life you’ve got to have application, energy, aptitude, learning; you’ve got to continually learn and read up about your environment. Not that I practised this initially, but I now do. You’ve got to keep yourself fit, keep time for your family, keep time for your community; so I volunteer. My life is very different from the one that existed 40, 50 years ago. So, I wouldn’t say mistakes, they were the right things to do at the time and I’ve learnt from each and every one of them.” Mistakes
On the subject of whether Y2K was a con or a necessity, Bill says: “What Y2K did was alert people who previously did not know anything about security to security, and it educated a huge number of people in the secure part of systems and to be alerted to systems. Having ran businesses, supplying GCHQ over here, high grade security products into BT, and NSA (National Security Agency) in the States, there’s a huge amount in the security environment that people simply aren’t aware of and clearly shouldn’t be aware of in some respects. What we did do was to educate a cadre of people to this environment which then formed the basis for new industries and new companies that went internationally to do various things. The reality is no single person knew everything about all the systems out there as to whether the threat was a reality or a possibility. In that environment of the risk of something catastrophic happening, you’ve actually got to take mitigating activities.” On Y2K
Asked why the public sector often struggles to implement IT projects, Bill says: “An awful lot of people in government are absolutely brilliant in economics, politics, history and philosophy. To deliver large-scale IT programmes requires a different culture, different training, different mentality, different accountability. Successfully delivering large scale systems such as we did with 8 new mobile networks across 8 countries concurrently is arguably larger than these government IT systems. Customer accountability is very important in that. There’s a lot that falls between the stools and suppliers are reluctant to criticise government because there’s so much money associated with it.” Bill adds: “I don’t think we need to spend the amount of money that we’re spending on IT in government, Health Service, HMRC and patient records, etc, because there are very simple ways of tackling it now. However, we’re actually in a significantly better place than Germany and the States as well. If you look at the furlough scheme, we’ve been able to implement the furlough scheme far more effectively than the US, and the US don’t have that national centralised system of getting money from the state into individual estates and out into individual people.” Public Sector IT
Bill says: “Blockchain is here to stay. It’s performing huge benefits already in payment systems, in logistics, in so many different facets of life. The only issue is bitcoin and cryptocurrency.” Blockchain
In 2015 Bill wrote a book MindWealth about Personal Wealth from Intellectual Property Rights, he explains his thinking: “70%+ of the value of a firm is in its Intellectual Property. People could harness the power of Intellectual Property Rights far more and benefit from that. Forty years of being exposed to technology industries in their various forms globally and seeing very many government initiatives, and being exposed to governments in so many different countries round the world and learning from successful businesses, etc, and seeing so many things going wrong for the technology industries in the UK, that to tackle people’s wellbeing, wealth and economy is, from an economics or a political perspective, being sub-optimised in what we have in the UK. I think we have to get our policies right; we have to think about industrial strategy and I call for a new kind of industrial strategy in the book. We need people to understand how Intellectual Property Rights affects their wealth and how government policies impact on that. We need government to understand how their policies impact people’s lives beyond the world of grants, credits and jobs. We need people to understand how to bring businesses into being that better serve a country rather than being distorted by government policies.” “There are ways and means of actually participating in new industry, the new technology. We’ve got to nurture them in the UK, we’ve got to develop them. The number of technology venture capitalists in the UK is not all that large and the EIS scheme got changed 18 months ago possibly as a result of the book which has been endorsed by senior-most politicians, so that we no longer back asset-backed businesses, buildings etc, instead we put our money into knowledge-based industries. The thrust of the book is let’s get our industrial strategy and our politics right and let’s get people benefiting in a different way from that.” Bill thinks the book has already had an impact based on feedback. Intellectual Property Rights
Interview Data
Interviewed by: Richard Sharpe
Transcribed by: Susan Hutton
Abstracted by: Lynda Feeley
