There has been a tremendous amount of media coverage both from journalists and economists and industry experts bemoaning the state of British industry and the decline of our manufacturing sector and the rise of the service industry. Personally I work in the service sector for my day job, creating copy for clients websites, generating news stories and articles and press releases, and generally creating a buzz around client businesses, but what is interesting is the number of manufacturing companies that I am working on behalf of. Given the negative press that the sector gets, when I started doing what I do, I fully expected to be producing work for service sector firms, but that just isn't the case. I think what we are seeing is an undoubted decline in large scale industrial processes particularly in terms of the car industry or shipuilding, but a transferance of those industrial processes into a vast number of small industrial firms, all contributing to a significant overall whole.
What is intersting to the historian in me is that this is a similar position to my home city, Birmingham, at the dawn of the industrial revolution a couple of hundred years ago. Birmingham used to be the city of a thousand trades, and it feels to me that we are returning to that situation with a great number of small firms starting to work collaboratively so that networks of entrepreneurs get together to share ideas and skills and talents to create wonderful products. It is fascinating to see how small gaps in the market are being exploited in new and interesting ways to generate significant economic contributions. Once you start to drill down into what these businesses do, and start to get to know the people who run them and work within them you get a real insight into just how much creative talent there is in our business communities.
We should celebrate more the entrepreneurial spirit of our small manufacturing and engineering companies, both those who have been established for a hundred years and those who are only just starting out. Rather than bemoaning the fate of our manufacturing sector, I would strongly suggest that our political leaders get out and about, start talking to the people who are going to be the long term saviours of our economy, not just on the high profile enterprise parks, but in the industrial back streets and alleys, and they might just be surprised at what they find.....
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