How Britain could have invented the iPhone: And how the Quangocracy cocked it up

What has this to do with Apple?

"developing kit capable detecting more than one fingertip at once, years before Apple did"

-Why is apple the big deal here? They invented nothing to do with multi-touch technology which are why all their patents concern doing things with multi-touch rather than multi-touch itself.

By and large all of the technology in the iphone was previously used by other companies. In the mobile sphere they excel at interface design and marketing, they do not invest much in technology per se (comparatively when compared to Microsoft, Samsung or Nokia) and consequently were not the competition to this UK inventor.

Patent?

I agree that Nesta was shit and the money pitiful but why didn't Andrew Fentem patent his idea?

A very good article that highlights issues I have seen with innovations my father tried to commercialise with government help from the 80s to the present day. He never managed to make a penny from things he invented in the 80s that I now see being re-invented today.

"no one at Nesta has a science or engineering background" - this, no idea how business functions in the real world and a complete lack of accountability among the civil service are the biggest problems this country faces. If we are to avoid sliding furhter into mediocracy and irrelevance we need to replace the old boys educated in the classics at Eton with some real people who know more than a couple of dead languages and have actually worked in their life. Unfortunately I doubt it will ever happen.

We've always been crap at turning ideas into money in the UK.

The real problem is getting patent protection at an affordable rate here. So the ideas either get ripped off or sold cheaply to the US because there's no protection on the ideas.

Applied for small grant to do some lab testing with Tech Strategy Board, refused first time, resubmitted addressing points raised (as allowable), declined again with lower scores, asked how this was possible considering the same content was included and expanded upon.

The responded by saying it had been sent to the wrong group of assessors so was sent to the first group again (who scored it higher) but TSB still declined, requested the feedback, which showed the independent assessors all recommended it be supported. TSB said it did not meet score threshold, erm yes it did by quite a margin, decided then and there they were a waste of space, though they are happy to give companies like Rolls Royce and Airbus millions for R & D.

NESTA said "great idea but far too small an amount for us to be interested in".

Bah!

I got my start in IT working for a machine tool company in Coventry in the late 70s. It isn't there any more and was failing even as I signed my contract of employment mainly because what money was spent on R&D was too much D and almost no R.

Research would have told the company that the world was moving into a plastic/single spindle/NC era and that there was no market for the cast iron/single spindle/hydraulic control machine they had built even though it would outlast the Placcy Jap machine by decades.

Lots of development costs though. They built three of the new model and they sat in the showroom for years. Biggest doorstops in the world.

But then we had a corporate structure built on the Grace Brothers model (seriously: two canteens, one for monthly paid staff the other for the weekly paid scruffs) and you couldn't tell management anything they didn't already know.

And I worked for the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert (again, seriously. Separated at birth). Knew nothing about computers and was proud of it. He was a manager you see. He "had people" to "do things".

Nothing to see here move along

Pack of wankers (politicians) appoint and pay another pack of wankers to fritter away money donated by the arithmetically challenged.

Nothing I find surprising.

I don't think...

... the iPhone's success was because of its touchscreen; I think it was because it was made by Apple and was therefore cool and shiny. The fanbois and bloggers and tech-journos-who-should-have-known-better like the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones then wouldn't stop blathering on about the sodding thing. The only reason that everybody has followed suit is that the Apple spin doctors have convinced everybody that that's what they want. Personally, I hate bloody capacitive touchscreens: most people's fingers are too fat to get any real control, and you end up with smudges all over your screen - it's complete madness.

Not Invented Here?

History is riddled with tales of inventors who were screwed over or not credited or who just missed out. And very often, history eventually reveals that whatever we may have thought, some widget or technique was actually invented earlier or by someone else. Somebody or some company or some country gets (or takes) the credit, and that's what the history books and the patent offices record. Consider the big Darwin celebrations and the "rediscovery" of Alfred Wallace and how the Royal Society conspired...

Hell, I am co-inventor with a US patent on the technique that Apple used to let users know they were actually ejecting a disc not discarding it in the recycle bin yet never received a shilling or even a thank you. That's just how things work in the real world.

In the frenetic and fractured world of high tech, a majority of good things are no doubt independently "invented" by many people at more or less the same time. Most of them will never be recognized or benefit. And most will not even have a dysfunctional quango to pass the blame onto.

--Prof. Larry Constantine (pen name, Lior Samson)

Despite the evidence..

The UK has become a world leader in the arts in the past 20 years and this sector of the economy is pretty successful so can't have been all bad.

Games

games like ... interactive carpeting

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I have to say that "interactive carpeting" sounds like the dullest game ever. I assume that it's a computer simulation of the thrill-packed life of a carpet fitter.

Ideas and Business

Many, many businesses fail because there's a huge disconnect between what people think has value and what has actual value. An idea is worth precisely nothing, zero, if you don't realize the idea. The same is true of excuses for failure to realize the idea, excuses are worth precisely zero.

Every single business will face seemingly insurmountable challenges, and it is how you manage those challenges that determines if your business, and your idea are successful. The idea, and the business, are worthless if you can't deal with the unique challenges you will face. For some it is regulatory interference, for some it is personnel management, for some it is distribution, for some it is competition, for some it is physics and for a very, very small group their challenge is actually funding (all the money on the world won't help 90%+ of businesses).

It does not matter what your challenge is, if it beats you that means you failed. Full stop. The failure is not, automatically, a reflection on your abilities, not all battles can be won, but again, it doesn't matter. At all. You failed, that is the only thing that matters.

The (very informative and well written article) is nothing more than the story of a business that failed in its first significant challenge. If you have dreams of global success in any field that are derailed by a minor semi-government agency then dreams is all you're ever going to have. If a minor challenge like in this story bests you, then there was never any hope of defeating a real regulatory challenge, much less an actual competitor.

Being overwhelmed by a system that is, ostensibly, supposed to help you isn't a positive indicator of potential. If the people helping you get the best of you, an actual competitor, someone who actively seeks to undermine you will certainly not have a problem. If you can't beat the system you'll never beat someone else who has.

This is an unfortunate story, but anything past the fail part, is a fairy tale. A lot of the commenters are lost in that part, the fairy tale part, as well. In business there is no such thing as an almost, or a could have been. There is only failure and success and it doesn't matter how you get to either of them. The second you forget that you've just joined the ranks of the failed.

Don't blame the Quango for your inability to find industry funding

The economy must not depend on Quangos providing venture capitol.

And no entrepreneur should seek funds from only one source.

You need to be prepared to have delays, run arounds, and denials of funding from any given source of funds.

Private venture capitolists. Other inventors. Other technology people. Do not depend on quangos.

Do not blame quangos.

You win some, you lose some - stop whining.

There isn't really any blame to apportion here at all.

You win some, you lose some.

It's really easy to sit on a high horse today talking about touchscreens which are everywhere, when back in the day it was unproven in terms of consumer take up and likelihood to succeed.

It's also the job of these government agencies to be prudent with cash. On this occasion they messed up in hindsight. Somebody I really feel sorry for is Trevor Bayliss, he got properly screwed over and taken advantage of by Labour.

Alan Sugar brought double deck tape recorders and word processors to everyones homes in the 80's and made himself £500m and a company with 50% of the PC market in Europe, But by the 2000's he completely cocked up with mobile phones, called Apple stupid, slagged off Orange and kept trying to flog some dated emailer phone thing.....same again...

You win some, you lose some.

I hesitated before replying but as somebody who worked at NESTA in the Invention and Innovation team, I cannot let some of this pass. I am regular reader and I am disappointed with the quality of reporting in this article. It is not balanced and would appear to be written based on a single source, without some basic fact-checking.

I cannot comment on Andrew Fentem's particular case but:

1) I&I was one small part of NESTA. We had an annual investment budget of £2.5m-£3m. The rest of the organisation received £12.5m+ in endowment interest and a substantial additional government grant annually. NESTA's total budget was £20m+ total.

2) We had plenty of scientists and engineers. One compsci + natsci from Cambridge; one molecular biology PhD from Cambridge; one physics PhD from Cambridge; one mathematician; one mathematical economist and one lifesciences masters.

3) Every other part of NESTA was either involved in "self-preservation and PR" (that describes the Strategy and Communications function accurately, which ate the lion's share of the budget like the Stasi in the DDR) or various Arts programmes. I&I were the uncool, nerdy people who read the footnotes, asked quantitiative questions and did not share the love. At the first opportunity, we were move to the basement and subsequently hidden in a different building entirely with the IT department and Finance!

4) The maximum investment we could make was initially £100k, I think. It was subsequently increased to £250k and then eventually to a sensible amount that can actually start a business. We had argued for a larger investment limit from the beginning but for a long-time it was seen by the Trustees as being too risky to actually commit significant venture capital rather than scattering feel-good seedcorn among mad inventors.

4) NESTA had started by trying to make light touch agreements with "awardees", based around a royalty on future sales, rather than forcing people to incorporate. These were unworkable in our view, leaving individuals exposed with unlimited personal liability as sole traders and making it very difficult for them to raise VC if successful with our seed money. It also initially made all award decisions using the same committee, from clowns to enterprise software. We moved NESTA to a model of investing for equity in companies (which explains why the royalty income after five years was negligible) and running a VC-type process for angel-size investments. We had co-investments with Apax, Wellcome Trust, Oxford Technology, Quester, 3i etc.

In summary, NESTA's initial approach needed changing (like every business plan) but we made many improvements (and could have made many more if NESTA had not abandoned direct investment) and this article paints an unfair picture of the work we did. The proof of the pudding is in the eating: there have been various good exits from the portfolio (Tideway Systems acquired by BMC; Cambridge Bluegnome acquired by Illumina; Hba1c test sold to Cholestech then Inverness Medical; Nanosight sold to Malvern Instruments). Some others are in £mm of revenue but not yet exited. An awful lot of the others have failed, which is what you would expect with early-stage VC.

A working rule of thumb

These organisation do not exist to further technological innovation: they exist to fulfil a political need to have the ammunition ready in case someone is accused of 'not doing enough about X Y or Z'.

Raising the issue of whether the organisation is achieving aims which were never part of its brief, is simply hot air.

The confusion arises out of the failure to realise the real purpose is not the stated purpose.

The real purpose is to be seen to be putting funds into technological innovation, not to actually achieve any.

Strangulation by committee

The British way or should I say the socialist way. The organizations created by the governments are staffed by good old boys, who have achieved the ability to share brain cells, and a single one at that.

They have no staff people on the cutting edge of the technology as Fentem was. All the staffers knew nothing, their qualifications were achieved by socio-political means. That meant they lacked the ability to see and comprehend ANY SORT of technical matters.

Fentem did very well indeed - he should have emigrated to the USA where he would have been snapped up by any one of a number of companies.

However, change in the UK is needed, as it is also needed in Europe who also suffer from this same political strangulation. Politicians can not and never will be able to recognize this and the UK way of control and funding is broke and needs to be replaced. Even now the same old crap is killing british science as the funds are now wasted and diverted too political warm bodies who know and do nothing (that same shared brain cell idea - how smart can they be.

The USA meddles less in companies and taxes less, so money for projects is easier to make, and people also have a culture of taking investment flyers on NEWCOs, while the British monied classes want to clip coupons.

How to change this - Guy Fawkes had the right idea, but his execution failed.

We need the ability to create a government body that can detect good ideas and toss away crooked schemes. Will it happen in the UK? Will this type of loss be repeated ad nauseum? Hard to say, but we need to get rid of all labor politicians and get some sort of technocracy going

Unfortunately the Technology Strategy Board makes NESTA look efficient and organised. Appallingly bureaucratic, inconsistent and disorganised.

But companies are no way to foster innovation

Companies have multiple problems when it comes to innovation. If you have ever worked in a real company you know that Dilbert is not an exaggeration. On the other hand, companies tend to delay advances, for example with patents.

What we need for further progress is a more scalable model for development. Free Software hints some ideas for such a model. Operating system kernels like Linux are a typically beyond the capabilities of a single company. (with few exceptions) Another example is the Internet which has by far outpaced any of its commercial competitors and even the ones run by telephone companies. Few people even remember Compuserve or the X.25 networks which still run today.

We need to stop thinking of companies as bringers of innovation.

Interesting - I didn't realise that Andrew Orlowski also writes for the Daily Mail under the name Nicholas Booth.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2523680/How-Britain-iPhone-technology-Apple-Quango-handed-advantage-competition.html

It's not the state that's the problem...

The danger of this article is it lends credence to the crude anti-state ideologues, who resort to the old chides about ‘picking winners’ and so on. This is all very well and boring, but isn’t born out by numerous cases where the state has funded highly successful enterprises. South Korea’s LG, and Frances EDF (who now run so much of our own privatised electricity infrastructure) come to mind. But it depends on the culture of the state...

To indulge in a bit of speculative sociology about all this – maybe the issue is less the role of the state per se, and more the specific historic problems of New Labour as it lost its bearings in embracing the market and its own brand of creative libertarianism. When market reforms were introduced (by the Thatcherites and by New Labour) into the actual interior functioning of the state, they problematised certain ideals of government. What this meant was that a whole set of governmental rationalities, procedural and organisational understandings, and standards of judgement were, if not lost, then skewed.

As New Labour continued the project of bring the market as a rationality into the workings of the state, they had to fundamantally alter their own anti or counter market values. The euphoric freedom and anxieties of undertaking so radical a revision of their own founding socialist principles, meant they came to believe that they were making the world anew. All the rules were off. The internet boom, the new millennium, Charles Leadbetter et al added to the heady atmosphere.

Into this wide open new world, the post-1968 left’s version of expressive individualism (Blair the Grateful Dead wannabe etc) came to offer new possibilities to reshape the very subjectivity of government agents through the affective ideals of creativity. Where the free market revolution is the revolution of the individual over the collective, the Conservative version was the revolution of the Instrumental Individual. The New Labour version imbued into this the revolution of the Romantic Individual. Perhaps this is partly a legacy of a left wing belief in wanting people to believe in the cause, to invest their role with subjectivity, rather than simply act on orders. In so doing it seems they opened the state to novel forms of governmental behaviour including informal forms of decision making, a tolerance of personal relationship, and a blurring of the lines between personal gain and public office. All this is what was going on in Andrew Fentem’s story. At the heart of government a fundamental ability to judge what ought to be done was set adrift and it went well beyond this story – it contributed to an acquiesence in the face of the creativity of the financial markets, and to the decision to take the UK to war in Iraq.

What we call this is a moot point. If we accept the new world of New Labour, that the pieces were in flux, and the new standards of behaviour and judgement were for us to creatively adapt and make anew, we might call this itself governmental innovation, or modernisation, in the interest of a generally more creative, more fluid, society and economy. The very sense of its slippery frisson might seem the guarantee of its efficacy in the new world of globalisation and celebrity. If we hold ourselves to the 'old' ideals and standards, we would call it corruption. I would like to think that beyond these two positions there are a whole range of ways the state might work to do a better job than this. As it is, this is all academic, as the current government is now simply seeking to dismantle the government – and in bitter irony, it is the failures of that marketisation of the state (rather than the state per se) that gives them the proof they need to claim the state is by definition moribund.

Anyway, you get my point, the article doesn't prove that the state per se is ineffective in supporting major industrial innovation. It’s just a small part in the story of how the lot that happened to be in power at the time were in many ways a bit daft.

What you need to understand about this article (although it is extremely well researched and well written), is that Andrew is determined to find examples of where the British government's approach to funding technology has failed.

Clearly this is one such example. However, the question which SCREAMS out of every paragraph of this article is "why did the inventor not go to the private sector in the first place?"

I guess we'll never know the answer to this question. What we do know is that a state funded technologist arrived at the same technology which was being explored by numerous different bodies at the same time, and that he ultimately failed to commercialise it.

Was this the fault of a quango? Only part 2 of this article will reveal.

Who really wrote this story ??

So, published here on the 13th, "written" by Orlowski. An almost identically-worded story in the Mail Online - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2523680/How-Britain-iPhone-technology-Apple-Quango-handed-advantage-competition.html - published on the 14th, "written" by Nicholas Booth.

So where did it originate ?? Neither article references the other, so either someone's guilty of plagiarism, or a 3rd party wrote it and flogged it round.

Only the tip of the iceberg

I used to be an external assessor for NESTA and can well believe every word of this report. Nor was this the only project badly handled (to put it mildly) by NESTA senior management, who were slothful, stupid, arrogant or greedy - and often all four.

Plus ça change...

Plus ça change...

www.TADAG.com but they only got part of it... :)

We get what we deserve. The concept of innovation may be alive and kicking in our universities but not in our investors. Think Dragon's Den and then scale up. In Dragon's Den you have a collection of people, allegedly 'investors' who, so far as I can tell, want to screw the poor sods who turn up. There's no sense of engaging with inventors unless the investor can get be guaranteed unreasonable returns. That's not investing but it does look like the style of 'investing' that occurs in the UK.

It's not surprising. In a country that needs a 'nesta' there is no support of innovation by investors unless the investors money is guaranteed by the state. In the US there is DARPA. But it supports truly futuristic ideas such as self-driving cars and supports it's projects over the long haul will $billions.

But it's not a new problem. Think of the computer. Invented here then labelled 'top secret' handing the market to the US. Or the jet engine. Initially met with skepticism eventually it was embraced by...the state in the form of BOAC which rapidly pulled out when Comets started falling like their namesakes. Instead others learned from the BOAC experience and took the market. UK 'investors' were no where near. Then there's the 'rescue' of car industry by Moulton and friends. The failure to commercialize the encryption used by the UK spy agencies which was 're-invented' in the US by three researchers with the initials RSA and given the name 'public key cryptography' which is now the way all web encryption works.

The list goes on. The bottom line is that UK investors do not. Not unless their return is guaranteed. And that's not investing.

I have long campaigned for a well funded X-Prize Foundation run by successful engineers, scientists, accountants and venture capitalists not politicians and civil servants.

To be fair such an organisation would not have directly funded this project in advance but if they had known that by achieving a target, short of commercial viability, the winning company would have won anything from hundreds of thousands to millions, real venture capitalists would have showered him with immediate offers of financial support.

Erratum

Typo's include a missing "a" and a mangled "quantitative". More importantly, NESTA's Hba1c investment was called Quotient Diagnostics and was sold to EKF Diagnostics, not Cholestec/Inverness Medical. Sorry for any confusion.

Britain and Apple Co-Equals? The Queen vs King Stevie?

Britain has never invented anything, anymore then the US or even California.

Inventions are the product of people known as inventors from 1 to 4 people (any more and its just a B.S. which can and does invalidate some patents because you can't list a non-inventor regardless if his name is Jobs on any US patent).

The inventors can assign their patent rights to any entity including Britain or Apple.

As far as inventors go some very great inventors originated in Britain.

Britain could not have invented the iPhone anymore then Apple did.

The iPhone is a product using thousands of inventions none of which in any basic way were created by Apple. Apple married these things into an exceedingly delicious dish which is and will remain for 2.6 more years a leading product in its class.

The iPhone is no more an invention then an appealing update to an operating system is an invention. It does qualify for a styling patent also known as a design patent but nothing more.

For most of us who found our inventions in the iPhone series it was a delight that the technology had a life after the patent expired.

It's all been done before- in fact in 1976

The general rigid touch screen with speed detection and multi-touch capability was invented in 1976. We invented and developed it and later used the speed detection on the select button based Felix pointer.

This device series corresponded to the contract description:

"The contract describes the development of “an innovative touchscreen technology”, specifically a touchscreen that can detect the speed at which one's fingertip moves across the display and can "capture multiple impacts across a surface area" – multitouch, in other words."

Hearing how difficult it was to reinvent in 2004 is rather sad and suggests that the Fentem and others intensionally avoided looking to see past inventions.

By the way a pair of prototypes running a Pong Game were shown to the Steve's at the Apple storefront in 1977 along with an early GUI and Jobs said their customers would prefer joysticks, Jobs didn't get the GUI at all.