Quick Notes!

I am not a car guy. I have little interest in F1 - except for when I hear stories of unbelievable design iteration speed. At this year’s ARIA Summit, Caroline Hargrove told of one of McLaren’s cars performing poorly in the Thursday practice in Monaco. By Friday, they designed and manufactured a new wing, to be installed in Monaco on Saturday. Caroline carried the wing on her BA flight, putting it in the seat next to her - not exactly inconspicuous!

F1 is an example of the UK excelling in engineering, they have brilliant specialist supply chains, engineering teams who can move at pace, and the budget to match it! What can we do to bring this excellence and speed to other areas? What would it look like to have a scientific team performing at the standard an F1 team is?

Very few of these F1 stories are available online - if you’ve got these stories, then I’d love to speak with you.

Cambridge Consultants has spun out twenty-seven startups and four unicorns - a track record better than any UK venture capitalist or university.¹ If CC were in the Silicon Valley, we would all know how they achieved this, I want to tell this story better and bring more information about their heyday to the startup community. David Connell’s piece “Exploding the Myths of UK Innovation Policy” is a great reference text for this.

In 1973 NASA launched Skylab 3 - a 59-day, manned, orbital mission. Aboard this spacestation was an automated cell culture system - the “Woodlawn Wanderer 9”. Over the next 50 years no-one has cracked automated mammalian cell culture. What can we learn from their system?

If you’re working on a problem in science, engineering, or medicine then NASA has already thought about it. NASA’s work touches every part of STEM and fortunately for you they write about most of it on their technical report server (NTRS). No one should start a project without first checking there! And as a second shot - the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).