British investor Sir James Dyson, founder of vacuum cleaner company Dyson, is donating $7.9m to The Royal College of Art to support engineering start-ups.
Sir James Dyson, founder of Dyson and inventor of the vacuum cleaner of the same name, has donated £5m ($7.9m) to his former university The Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.
The money will be used to fund 40 new incubators. Chosen start-ups will be given working space, mentors, and will be introduced to potential angel investors to help get their projects off the ground.
Unlike many incubators, Dyson has indicated that the start-ups should be “physical”, and support engineering projects over digital start-ups.
Two start-ups are already developing businesses at the RCA’s Dyson building. The first, Loowat, is designing toilets that can be used to generate heat, electricity, and fertilizer. The second, Kwikscreen, is developing portable, retractable room dividers. The start-up has already attracted the National Health Service, the world’s fifth largest employer, as a customer, and the screens were used during the London 2012 Olympics.
“Sustainable wealth is created from the creation of tangible patentable goods – real technology that can be made and exported, but the bright designers and engineers capable of developing such technology are simply not around,” said Dyson to tech news provider Gizmodo.
He continued: “Britain only creates around 12,000 engineering graduates a year. India graduates 1.2 million engineers a year. China’s engineering graduates will grow from 2.6 million in 2010 to 3.6 million in 2015. Iran and the Philippines both produce more engineers than the UK. The problem is serious. Britain will simply be left behind.”
Dyson has been a provost at the RCA since last year, and set up the James Dyson Foundation in 2002 to support and encourage young British engineering talent.
