Making it big in manufacturing

When Professor Mike Gregory started to plan to move the Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) from the mostly subterranean old building it shared with rats in the middle of the city, it might have looked like a final fling for a dying activity in the UK. Back then, some four years ago, just about the only people that governments listened to when devising economic policy were the masters of the universe in the financial sector. Manufacturing in noisy factories was yesterday’s way of making money.

By the time that Cambridge was ready to invite the Duke of Edinburgh, who describes himself as “the world’s most experience plaque unveiler,” to officially open the IfM’s new building, manufacturing was back in fashion. The attempts to revive the economy after the recent implosion of the financial system not only involved desperately shovelling money into banks, there was also support for manufacturing, in the shape of ‘incentives’ to keep open car making factories.

The M word now features regularly in politicians’ speeches who seem to have suddenly realised that making things is still a sizeable chunk of the UK’s economy. A select committee of MPs was one of many posses of politicians to point out, in a report earlier this year, that “In 2008, it was the world’s sixth largest manufacturing nation” and “In 2007, it was the eighth largest exporter of manufactured goods”.

Just this week, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, complained that “we sometimes have a glib notion in this country that we don’t really make anything anymore, that we are no longer an industrial economy,” a notion that he dismissed, albeit in the context of the motor industry, a major importer of manufactured goods. He also announced new investment totalling £22 million “to further advance the development of ‘composite’ materials”

Another change since all that Gregory had to show of the IfM, a part of the engineering department at Cambridge University, was an architect’s model, has been further confirmation of China’s central position in manufacturing, with even more companies moving production to Chinese factories. If anything, this just confirms IfM’s steady move away from concentrating on the nuts and bolts of manufacturing, how to introduce robots on to the factory floor, for example.

China’s rise as a manufacturing giant has also provided the IfM with more research ideas. One outcomes was the report “Understanding China’s manufacturing value chain”

It might seem “a bit sad” as Gregory puts it, but “we like factories. So the robots, top of the line kit from Japanese manufacturers, still have a home in the new building’s automation lab. These days, though, the robots work alongside researchers who cover the “full cycle, from understanding markets and technologies through to products,” as Gregory said at last week’s opening of the new IfM on Cambridge’s west campus.

Unlike the buildings you traditionally associate with the university, those on the mostly undergraduate free west campus are more likely to appeal to makers of modernistic science fiction films than period movies. The new £15m home, with its ultra-green environment rating, might be a million miles from the IfM’s old home in the middle of the city. IfM now sits alongside other new Cambridge ventures, such as the IT department’s William Gates building and the Hauser Forum “a focal point for entrepreneurship and technology transfer”.

Like these other buildings, the IfM’s new facility gets its name from a major donor. Dr Alan Reece, founder of Pearson Engineering, which develops “combat engineer systems and equipment,” chipped in with a £5 million contribution to the building costs. A further £5 million came from the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, the vehicle that Lord David Sainsbury uses in his efforts to give away “at least £1 billion” during his lifetime, adding to £7 million or so that it has put into the IfM since 1991.

The manufacturing label hasn’t been an accurate reflection of everything that IfM does for some time now, which explains why it has added “technology” and “policy” to its banner heading. With 240 researchers and other staff, up from 50 a decade ago, the IfM also houses the Centre for Technology Management and is active in studying such hot topics as open innovation, for example.