Tim Minshall

Tim Minshall is a professor at the University of Cambridge who heads the Institute for Manufacturing, an organisation whose aim is simple: to help manufacture a better world.  Over the past 20 years Tim has worked with thousands of students who have come to Cambridge to learn about manufacturing through ‘hearing it; seeing it; doing it’, and who have gone on to lead the charge towards that goal of manufacturing a better world.

 

He is an award-winning lecturer, runs outreach programmes to raise awareness of manufacturing among primary and secondary schoolchildren and their teachers, researches and writes about manufacturing, innovation and skills, and regularly delivers talks on these topics nationally and internationally. He contributes to a wide range of national manufacturing policy initiatives in the UK and overseas.

 

He has worked in Japan and Australia as a teacher, consultant and engineer before moving to Cambridge to help support tech entrepreneurs develop their ideas into products. Then, to the surprise of many (not least himself) he became the first-ever Professor of Innovation at the University of Cambridge, a position created by a donation from one of the UK’s most prolific innovators and successful manufacturers, Dr John C Taylor OBE (the inventor of, amongst many other things, the electric kettle switch used by billions around the world every day).