Results orientated solutions

Alexander Hughes Selection is a leading executive recruitment practice. We work with a range of public and private sector organisations, delivering client-led, results-focused executive recruitment solutions.

We believe the efficacy of our approach is illustrated in our high percentage of repeat business, and the calibre of organisations with whom we work.

Interview with Professor Hugh Clare

Director of the Micro Nanotechnology (MNT) Network UK 
 

AHS: Hugh, very good of you to come along and have a chat today.  I think it would be very useful for us to cover off your involvement in Micro and Nano Technology from day one, because when we met about three years ago, it was in the specific context of the DTI’s initiative to set up the MNT Network – there wasn’t one - so that’s been your achievement over the last three years, but your involvement of course goes long before then doesn’t it? 

Prof. Clare: Indeed, my involvement in the technology goes back a very long way, it goes back to when I was a student at University, particularly a post-graduate student, and at that time I was trying to make sense of the failure mechanisms of composite materials.  During the whole of my career, I’ve been drawn back to the micro and nano scale. I’ve managed businesses but I’ve also kept my hand in regarding the science which is extremely important in such a fast moving and broad area.  To that end, I am a visiting professor at Liverpool University.  My post-graduate students help me dabble in my favourite topics of science, which is quite nice.  

AHS: I know that you help to found the Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology Manufacturing Association (MMA).  What was the story behind that? 

Prof. Clare: I went on a trade mission to Europe sponsored by the DTI just about 10 years ago – and there were about fifteen or so people on the trade delegation. I know quite a few of them.  They were drawn from MNT companies as well as industry in general. 

I knew the scene in Europe very well.  I had done a lot of work there, particularly Germany, I knew Holland very well and I had also done some work in Spain, France and Italy.  I had commissioned work in universities, as well as placing contracts and working closely with MNT companies.     

The week-long trade mission visited France and Switzerland. Most of the people in the delegation hadn’t really seen for themselves first-hand what was going on outside the UK.  As the week progressed people became more concerned.  It is no exaggeration to say that we ended up with a crisis meeting on the Thursday evening, with people keen to do something about the situation in the UK.  We had a few beers around a very large table; people were talking about what they’d seen and the fact that the UK had nothing like this, and that we were in real danger of falling behind in the exploitation of Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology.  I don’t know if it was because I was head of the table, but I found myself elected that evening to be the interim Chairman of the MMA.  I was eventually voted in as the chairman, which is a role I fulfilled for almost five years.  The MMA is still running out of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.  

Immediately, the formation of the MMA gave a focal point for all MNT activity in the UK and the DTI put quite a bit of money into the MMA to encourage commercial development of MNT in the UK.   

AHS: Very interesting.  I suppose we were involved at the stage when the DTI decided to do something concrete about that and I seem to remember the Taylor Report emerging at some point which highlighted some of the things you mentioned about the lack of investment and the fact that most trade delegations passed this country by at one point.  

Prof. Clare: Absolutely, they did. 

AHS:  And it was Lord Sainsbury’s voting of £ £90 million of Government money to actually plough into this that led to the initiative to recruit that senior position.   Talk us through your experience of that, because that was really an extremely pivotal point in the whole development of the MNT in this country. 

Prof. Clare: It was.  The Taylor Report was published as you say about 4 years ago now.  I knew John Taylor, and I sat down with him when he was drawing up the document.  I had a meeting with him on the eve of the publication of the report to discuss the implications.  Basically there were two major recommendations in the report.  One was the formation of a network of open access facilities in the UK, and the other was the formation of the MNT Network.  About 6 months later, the Government announced the £90million injection of funding that you talked about.  Lord Sainsbury made the announcement.  What’s interesting is that if you read the Taylor Report now, you will find all of the main recommendations have been carried out. 

AHS:  Really!  That’s unusual. 

Prof. Clare:  It is very unusual, but also I think very satisfying.   

The £90million was it was split into two - £50million was earmarked for collaborative research projects and £40 million for the creation of a network of open access facilities. It was very important that the £40million was used to leverage matched funding.  On its own it would have been a drop in the ocean.  What the UK was up against was very large amounts of money being invested by both central and local Government by its international rivals such as Japan and the USA.  The US has invested about $5billion since the early 1980s and Japan has invested about $4billlion and they are now slogging it out and investing around $1billion a year each. 

AHS:  That’s huge! 

Prof Clare:  It’s a huge amount of money and it is focused to encourage commercialisation of MNT. 

AHS:  So that excludes the defence related investment? 

Prof Clare:  No, it includes defence related investment. 
 

AHS:  So you’ve got aspects of spinning out commercial applications of maybe defence related initiatives? 

Prof. Clare:  Yes – they are investing in new facilities which are essentially defence related but they are looking to spin out the technology as well.  I’ve talked to people in the National Science Foundation in the past and one of the things they are very keen to do is they put money into academic institutions such as SANDIA.  SANDIA has a huge investment from the National Science Foundation with a high proportion that is military based but the NSF wants as much technology as possible to find its way into commercial applications. 

AHS:  So the goal from what you mentioned when you talked about matched funding, and that presumably means for every £1 that goes in from Government, they are looking for money to come from elsewhere.  What were the other sources of money? 

Prof. Clare:  Yes.  There were two main sources of money – one was from the Development Agencies which includes the English Regional Agencies, and the devolved agencies of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.  The other source of funding was industry and there was also some funding in fact that we obtained from academia.  In total we leveraged a total of about £228million from the £40million we started off with. 

Going back a bit, you asked me the question about what I inherited.   

The money was administered initially by consultants on behalf of the DTI.  The grant process developed by the DTI ran very smoothly, but the funding for MNT required a different approach.  It required the development of a strategy for MNT for the UK, which formed the basis of the plan for the creation of the network of open access facilities 

It proved hard initially to get good bids from industry.  All of this changed once the strategy had been developed, which enabled much clearer guidance to bidders.  

AHS: So what you in fact had inherited was really nothing, no office, no resource, just an idea?  Just talk us a little bit through the steps of the ascent from nothing to where we are now, which is quite considerable. 

Prof. Clare: As I said, it was just me to begin with, and my home computer.  I did my own administration including travel arrangements, my own arrangements for meetings and so on.  I had to get myself well known pretty quickly.   

The only thing I inherited that was useful and it was just in its early stages, was the Executive Panel, which had been formed to help oversee the allocation of funds.  I very quickly focused that group to help me with the MNT strategy for the UK.  It was a very strong group of experts drawn from industry, academia and finance who were able to determine the sort of organisation of open access facilities that were needed in the UK.  

We knew we wouldn’t do everything, so we focussed on where the UK was strong both in manufacturing and across Industry in general, but also in terms of where the UK was strong in Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology.  Once we determined that, and once we looked at what was in the Taylor Report, we then created a strategy for the open access facilities.  So that was the starting point of and very, very quickly the Executive Panel established itself as a very strong base.  I still chair the Executive Panel today.  It wasn’t an easy group to chair, since they all came to the table with some very strong-held views.  It was quite difficult and exhausting having to manage two-day meetings.  However, these were experts and leaders in their field, and the level of debate was of the very highest order. 

AHS:  Did this complexity come from many different agendas or somewhere else? 

Prof. Clare:  Well it came from a number of different angles.  The first was that we were starting off with a blank sheet of paper.

As I said, the people on the Executive Panel were drawn from experts in MNT across industry, academia and the world of finance.  We also had representatives from the Development Agencies as well, and of course the DTI sent their representatives to observe the meetings.   

They Panel looked at interconnects, they looked at how to create a strong MNT group of open access facilities for the UK.  They also sought to raise the UK by its bootstraps to compete with the rest of the world.  We were anything up to 10 years behind the game. 

AHS:  You mentioned earlier on Professor Clare that consultants were very much at the centre of activities when you took over and this and in fact that was the way in which we became involved because we had done work for one of the consultants, Ernst and Young, in the past and they were asked to make a recommendation to the DTI about a number of companies who could potentially help them.   

We made a presentation and were successful. And I have to say that it was a fascinating learning curve for us in understanding the differences between micro and nanotechnology’s mind-boggling terminology but you were part of the process that we got involved with the DTI, the Executive Panel and some private sector people as well.  You were one of a very robust shortlist of 6 people and to be quite frank were seen as head and shoulders above the rest and were duly appointed.  From that point, we were so fascinated by what we regarded as nothing more than a renaissance of British industry, almost a potential for renaissance, a new Industrial Revolution, and have stayed close with what was going on since then. 

I’d like to come back a little later to your experience of working with us, because it would be very nice to get your views of how you were treated and how you were valued; but just in the context of from then until now, what are we seeing in place now that wasn’t there when you arrived? 

Prof. Clare: I talked before about the creation of the open access facilities. That has been conservatively estimated to be a £700 million resource for the benefit of UK industry, but it goes much wider than that because it is a significant resource in the global supply chain.  There were recommendations for its creation, but it didn’t exist at all.   

The other main thing is what the MNT Network has achieved.  The remit was to create a robust MNT infrastructure in the UK.  You mentioned earlier on about the fact that, just a few years ago, trade delegations didn’t even bother coming to the UK, and getting investment was very difficult in this area.  You only have to look at reports that were written by the EU about the state of microsystems and nanotechnology in the UK to see that they largely dismiss the UK.  They talked about maybe 60 companies or so, involved and these were small players in the area – there was no focal point at all.  Just about all of the UK’s major international competitors had such infrastructure which had been built with the support of central and local government funding over twenty or so years 

We now have a recognisable and very strong MNT infrastructure in the UK.  The Germans requested if they could second someone to the MNT Network to learn how we had created it; I was approached by the French who wanted to join forces with us.  Quite a turn-round in a very short space of time. 

AHS: And that is a very significant achievement and you mentioned earlier on about the division of the money.  I understand you were guiding expressions of interest to derive the maximum benefit of taking research to the market.  Unsurprisingly, that’s quite the sort of rigour of business planning and commercial reality that you wanted.  Having watched from the background, the way that the MNT Network was developed under your steermanship, we have become involved at the beginning of this year in recruitment of key positions for two of those facilities.   They sit in two very interesting areas as far as I can see which is: nano-metrology and nano-materials.  Talk us a little bit through those, because that’s been our most recent involvement in recruiting a CEO and BDD for each. 

Prof Clare: I’ve talked about the development of the strategy. What we ended up with was four key areas that the UK was particularly strong in.  I talked about the fact that we couldn’t do everything and that it was important to use the money wisely and to concentrate on our strengths.  You’ve mentioned nano-metrology and nano-materials (particles).  We also identified nano-integration, which includes sensors and accelerators for example; and the fourth area was nano-medicine where the UK has tremendous strengths. 

When we were constructing the network of open access facilities, it became clear that the two areas you mentioned needed special attention.  It was decided that the best approach was to create a hub-and-spoke organisation in each, and to cluster key individual facilities around these.  So for nano-materials we created National Particulates and for nano-metrology CEMMNT was created.  

Let me deal with these one at a time.  Let’s start with CEMMNT. 

The UK has real strengths in measurement and characterisation.  NPL for example is recognised around the world and holds definitive standards in a whole range of areas.  In recent years this has come to include Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology.  What we wanted was a commercial edge.  CEMMNT has achieved this with hard-nosed commercial partners including BAE Systems, SEIC, Coventor, Taylor Hobson, and QinetiQ working alongside NPL.  I think that what we’ve put together is a very strong organisation – it’s unique in the world – there is no other organisation like it. 

Your involvement as AHS is extremely important because in many ways it’s the start of the company, even though we had big-hitters and big players on the international stage in measurement and characterisation.  It’s important for it to have a very strong focal point and a very strong centre, and I think the appointment of Elwood Vogt has given them that strong focal point.  They still invite me along to their Board meetings and I was at one of their Board meetings not so long ago and I must say they are making terrific progress and I am absolutely delighted. 

To go back to National Particulates (NP), the same thing applies here.  It was decided that the best way forward again was to give then a strong focal point and a bespoke organisation with a commercial edge.  Again I’m delighted with the progress that they have made.  I’d like to add to that and say that I think that AHS played a very important part in the appointment of people and in getting the right profile because in may ways the project had started off with perhaps a bit of a legacy behind them in terms of the people who had driven it. 

It was a difficult decision, it would have been easy to have left those people in place and I think that would have been the wrong decision.  The right decision was to actually bring in new people with different skills to the people who had actually formulated the projects in the first place. 

AHS: So we’re now 3 years into the programme.  Much has been done and a huge amount of that achievement lies at your door per se.  What do you think are the key things that need to be addressed now to really move this forward? What do you see as the challenges and opportunities? You’ve got a great platform now to build on from, whereas three years ago there was nothing – no international profile - certainly that has changed. What do you think can be done and should be done next?  

Prof. Clare: It is very challenging. The main thing is that people have to find customers, and the interface with industry is absolutely vital. One of the things that we have been doing during the last year is creating bridges between the MNT community in the UK and around the world in a number of different ways. One is we’ve been going out and selling the MNT Network and the facilities; we’ve been working very closely with UK Trade & Industry (UKTI). We have in fact been sponsoring three significant events in the three key countries around the world (Japan, USA and Germany). The UK is now considered to be the fourth dominant country in the world in MNT. That was determined by Lux Consulting about a year ago so we’ve moved a very long way in a very short space of time. I’m sure if they’d conducted that four or five years ago, we would probably not have even figured on the map!  

So selling and getting the profile really well established within the global supply chain and winning orders both in the UK and overseas, are the biggest challenges that the facilities have now. 

We have something that was unique when we created it but people have been copying us hand over fist, so you are now seeing networks being created in many other countries.  Within three or four months of us going live on our websites, the Americas launched a website heralding a network, which really is about seven or eight universities / academic institutions funded by the NSF, so it isn’t quite the same as the MNT Network. The Germans and other countries have created networks.  I’ve also been talking to the EU as well, and really, they are very keen to see the sort of things that we’re doing rolled out across Europe.  

AHS: From your point of view, is there an opportunity here for you to provide some sort of European leadership in setting up a European MNT Network?  

Prof. Clare: I’d like to think so. I don’t know what those opportunities might be.  We are in a very competitive world, and I talked of the huge sums of money that the Japanese and the Americas are spending. I have talked about the focus that we decided we would go for in the UK.  Other countries such as South Korea have given their efforts a very sharp focus; they’ve really focused on nano-bio.  Two countries I haven’t mentioned, who are coming up very strongly are China and India. I would guess that China, in the next 10 years, will be a very strong player in the field followed by India. I don’t see India being quite as strong as China though.  I talk from experience, because I have commissioned work in the past in China and I know about the strength of their work. I also have some very, very bright Chinese students who, particularly in the last couple of years, have done incredible work.   They’re so motivated and when they go back to China they will work in this area, and no doubt they will be our competitors. 

AHS: You paint a picture to me that suggests that much has been done, but there are some significant competitive challenges ahead of us.  What message would you want to send to Government, and perhaps to Industry as well that would help us in 2 ways (i) Find a competitive edge and keep it and (ii) where should we be making the major contribution?   

I know these are very big questions?  

Dr Clare: They are big questions but I think Government is still finding it difficult to handle Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology. I think one of the problems is that it covers and crosses all the boundaries between the different scientific disciplines and I think that Government have difficulty with this.  Academia had difficulty initially but they have now resolved their differences and what I find in academia is that there is a lot of cooperation and collaboration going on.  I’ve had close contact with EPSRC over many years (not just the 3 years since I became Director of the MNT Network) and there is a great deal of understanding of the needs within the Science Research Councils than within government.   

I’m afraid we’ve lost our biggest champion in Lord Sainsbury just in the last couple of weeks.  You said earlier about having difficulty in understanding the differences between Microsystems Technology and Nanotechnology – Lord Sainsbury ask me to explain this on a number of occasions when I first met him.  He was very thorough and clearly did understand the difference and the significance.  

The terms define a spectrum of technologies and I always talk about it as a continuum going from the atomic scale to a few hundred microns.  And the reason it is a continuum is that you may utilise a Microsystems environment to create nano material or group nano materials together to produce a microsystems device.  So you can go in both directions, up and down the scale. 

The Government and the DTI have done an excellent job in addressing the needs of the UK in this area over the last three years.  However, I see a danger is that the Government/ DTI may believe that they have ticked a box and they can walk away from it. It still needs a lot of investment from Government, both local and central. There is a lot of local Government money going into the area – I’m delighted to say.  It’s a considerable amount of money, approaching £200million that the Development Agencies have put into nanotechnology over the last three years – so it is significant – and some very significant centres that have been built.  However, if the UK is serious about competing on the world stage we need an investment of the order of £1 billion over the next ten years.   

Paul: What are the challenges of attracting talent to the industry? Is there a brain drain, are we seeing our brightest young things go overseas? Could we put all of this in the context of a talent attraction / recruitment point of view?  

AHS: That’s a very good point. I remember attending one of the meetings at the NPL and it was a gathering of measurement characterisations people.  There was also one of the leading research scientists from the Imperial College. He saw me looking at his display, he came over and we got to talk.  He talked me through the constitution of his team and the length of time it’d taken him to develop this project (which was for a bio-sensor for administering drugs without breaking the skin) and he said two interesting things. One was how the length of time (picking up on one of the points you made) from research to market is governed by available money and that it took, by his experience, a factor of 60 of whatever you spent on the research side to get it to market i.e. you multiply this by 60x in order to get it to market.   

I asked if he had difficulty attracting talent to his team and he said that there was plenty of first-rate mathematicians, but not in the UK.  When we went to market looking for the experience that we needed for your CEMMNT and NP facilities, it is quite noticeable now that you’ve expanded that community hugely and when we last spoke you mentioned that it had grown to something like 43,000.  There is a pool of involved talent that wasn’t there before. 

What do you see as the real difficulties of attracting the sort of talent we had to go looking for? 

Prof. Clare: It is a huge challenge. I’ve only got to go back just about three years, just before I left Unilever when I was looking to recruit MNT experts.  I think we only had one quality applicant from the UK.  I found myself conducting interviews over video links to the US particularly, and there were also strong candidates from Holland and Germany as well as the Far East. 

One of the things I’ve been trying to do and it’s still ticking along (not moving along as fast as I want it to) – was I tried to create an apprenticeship scheme within the UK for this area. We have obtained substantial funding from the Welsh Development Agency in particular and I put a small amount of funding in as it was all I could afford on the budget I was on, but the Welsh DA put in £300,000.   

There is a shortage of people, it’s not just in the UK, it’s a worldwide shortage – even in the US you will have problems recruiting people. 

A very important statistic is that there are a further 400,000 jobs across UK industry that rely on MNT technology as major component of their products, and/or their processes. Those industries need people with expertise. 

AHS: Specifically related to our involvement in the sector and the successes we’ve had so far, where do you think AHS can best add value to this process?  

Prof. Clare: Before answering that question, I’d like to go back to how I was recruited by AHS. I found it a very positive experience – I’ve been to many job interviews during my career.  I’ve only worked for two major corporations, incidentally, but, I’ve been headhunted quite a few times, and resisted. I found it positive, because I believe that you had taken the time and trouble to find out about the industry before you placed the adverts and conducted the interviews. You surrounded yourself with experts during the interview process and I found the whole process very professional. I’ve been on the other side of the fence and recruited a large number of people so I know both sides for e.g. at Unilever we were using the ‘Competency based process’. So overall, I found the whole experience to be very positive.  I gained quite a lot from that that process – in terms of confidence as well, because it was a rigorous process. 

Paul: Could you outline a bit from your side how you came to get the robust shortlist that you talked about? What was the process?  

AHS: Our involvement came from being invited to tender for the work and to say”how do we go about it and what we thought the essential elements of the process were?” The contribution we made was to highlight – as Hugh very kindly said – we did our homework on the sector and went out and talked to an awful lot of people about what was going on in that field. We gave guidance and advice to the DTI on the constitution of a panel of interviewees and the sorts of number of people who should be on the shortlist, so really we were looking at a cross section of the available experienced talent on the market. I think Hugh found it to be a rigorous process both ways from the process we applied that lead us to have very strong candidates, and that was borne-out by the judgment of the panel. I like to describe executive recruitment, that is to say recruiting a position where the risks of getting it wrong are high but the rewards of getting it right are great as mitigating risk. I see the function of a recruiter being managing risk on behalf of the person recruiting – and that really comes down to ensuring that you really do understand in depth what the requirement and you’ve understood what the demands will be placed upon the individual to meet those requirements, what support the individual will need. So I think both parties, the employer and the employee, need to go into that process with eyes wide open so there’s no nasty surprises, and I’m glad to say there were no surprises with this process.  

Prof. Clare: If I can pick up on that, I talked about feeling very positive about the process, leading up to the appointment.  I felt even more positive when I was giving some of my public talks when I’d first been appointed to this role.  There was often somebody from AHS there, so Sabina came to quite a few of the events initially and I felt very positive about that, that you didn’t just, sort of, cast me off, that this was a sector that you recognised as very, very important.  To give you an idea of its importance - the predictions are that this sector will be worth $1500 billion by 2015 so it’s a huge sector and this was predicted at the turn of the century, and if you look at the published figures for the market to-date, its actually on track, so looks as though its going to achieve these sort of levels by 2015.  A lot of it is hidden at the moment – a lot of it is in products that we take for granted everyday and incidentally the UK has four very large factories in Northern Ireland owned by Seagate and the UK makes a significant proportion of computer reading heads for the world market. 

But coming back to your question about what AHS can do - AHS are now competent in this area; I don’t see too many other organisations like yours who have this sort of competence of what’s required. Very quickly - what’s going to happen is: large corporations are aware of the technology, large corporations are doing some work (largely people doing this work have been bred in house) but this won’t be good enough in the next few years. What large corporations will need are experts in their fields, who can pull the technology. And I believe AHS can play a very important role in this. Also, the sector itself – again, lots of the staff started off in different sectors, maybe microelectronics, will need to find the right people in the future as well. AHS will have a very important role to play as you set your stall out to understand this area, and I believe you’ve made some excellent appointments, aside from mine.  

AHS: thank you for your insight into the industry. You have a role to play in its future and if you wave your magic wand, where do you see things going.  

Prof. Clare: I really do believe that I do have the expertise and the skills to bring a European dimension to the network. Europe needs to take on Japan and America. There is €4 billion to be spent in the sector over the next 5-6 years. I have been talking to a couple of people in the commission – we are trying to ensure the UK wins as much of this money as possible. I want to make sure the UK is recognised in Europe in the way Germany and France are.