Does it help to have governments create an incentive framework? yes. Does it help to have organisations like the Design Council encourage innovation and spread best practice? yes. Does it help to bring the boffins together to talk in their own language? yes. But more than anything else, it needs people, companies and governments to recognise, encourage and sustain the inventor, the entrepreneur, the lateral thinker...

Speech delivered by Bill Alexander, CEO Thames Water, at the Design Council Millennium Products conference in Johannesburg, 12 November 1999