Magna Parva director Andrew Bowyer

There’s probably never been a more important time for engineers to be good at business. With the government desperate for a manufacturing revival to boost economic growth, the pressure is on for UK engineering firms to turn good ideas into moneymaking ventures.

It’s a shame, then, that one of Britain’s most prominent entrepreneurs, Lord Alan Sugar, doesn’t think engineers make good business people he drew vigorous criticism for stating so on his popular TV show, ’The Apprentice’.

Surprisingly, it’s a view that Andrew Bowyer, an engineer by training and commercial director of one of the UK’s most exciting young research firms, Magna Parva, seems to have some sympathy with. ’I certainly don’t think business people make good engineers,’ he says, ’and so I didn’t try.’

Having left school at 16 for an apprenticeship and then an engineering degree, Bowyer now calls himself a salesman and, when he founded Magna Parva in 2005 with partner Miles Ashcroft, he was clear that he wanted to stay focused on bringing in the money. ’I love being immersed in engineering but I took the decision that I would step away from doing actual engineering work.’

It’s an approach he thinks more firms in the industry could benefit from. ’Most small engineering companies are started by engineers who do the work and run the business. When Miles and I started, he did the [engineering] work and I was 100 per cent on overheads and developing the business. And I think that’s probably paid off.’

“I certainly don’t think that business people make good engineers – and so I didn’t try”

In six years, the Leicester-based company has established itself a reputation for taking on ambitious space projects far from the more usual fare of Britain’s satellite-focused industry. Working with major players such as ESA and Astrium, the firm is helping to create novel European capabilities such as the ExoMars rover and windows for manned space flight. Its latest idea is to develop off-planet factories to cut the material cost and complexity of equipment by building it in space.

It was the possibilities of the sector that attracted Bowyer to it, despite his lack of direct experience working for space companies. ’From a commercial perspective, space engineering is 90 per cent R&D,’ he says. ’You fly your prototype. You don’t ever make 100 or 1,000 of something. So, as an R&D company, it is a very natural place to live.’

This focus on pure research and development is also behind his insistence that Magna Parva is not a space company. Although around 80 per cent of its current business comes from that sector, the firm has also worked in aerospace, defence, automotive and manufacturing. The link is what Bowyer calls ’engineering for hostile environments’, designing robust equipment that can survive anything, from heat, pressure and dust to radiation or simply high speeds.

Crossing into other sectors has opened some exciting doors. There’s some ’pretty cool stuff in defence to do with UAVs’ that Bowyer can’t talk about. ’There’s also some work we’re doing on countering IEDs [improvised explosive devices, commonly used against troops in Afghanistan] and that’s really, really important as well as being fun,’ he says.

Being able to work across industries also helps the company to find novel solutions to problems and to transfer ideas. But part of Bowyer’s original reason for going into R&D was personal, as it enabled him to work with lots of different companies, technologies and people. It sounds like he gets bored easily.

’I’ve got an exceptionally short attention span,’ he agrees. ’But I genuinely look for stuff that is fun to do and there’s a good reason for that. We tend to employ younger members of staff, either fresh graduates or those with one or two years’ experience. Those guys need pushing, hard, and so it’s up to me to provide our very talented guys and girls with the challenges they need to thrive.’

The company has taken on an increasing amount of space work in the last year, but Bowyer is determined to grow other parts of the business so that space is no more than 50 per cent of what they do. And there’s an important business reason for that too.

“At the moment space is fashionable but next year the country might be in a worse state so we’ve got to balance it out with normal industrial work”

’Space is very subjected to government cuts,’ he said. ’At the moment, space is quite fashionable but next year the country might be in worse state so we’ve got to be able to balance it out with normal industrial work.’

However he also agrees that, by devoting a large proportion of time to cutting-edge space research such as off-planet factories, Magna Parva is helping to forge a new direction for the industry. ’We have a vested interest in it but we think space-based manufacturing is a clear route forward for the UK,’ says Bowyer. ’[Aside from communications satellites,] the UK has lots and lots of little specialisms and that’s been a bit of a hindrance to UK growth because we specialise in so many things.’

But how does encouraging industry to focus on a single niche fit with Magna Parva’s aim to work in many different areas? ’I think that a well-defined technology strategy for the UK would help the SMEs to define their own strategies,’ he responds. ’That’s different from saying we need a single niche; it’s saying we need a single plan which the UK Space Agency is starting to do some good work on.

’Moving technologies through the development “valley of death” is our niche or specialism and is industry-agnostic. In fact, being able to pull ideas from different markets is actually the enabling factor that makes us good at our job.’