I highly recommend reading this wonderful biography before you read the interview with Dr John L. Collins. It’s full of insights into the rich life experiences of a beautiful mind.
John’s had a very eclectic education and careers path. Everything started when he was around 11 and he began to take up all sorts of hobbies. John was always an outdoors-sort of person and went orienteering, camping, foraging, climbing, youth hostelling, abseiling, canoeing, caving and learned how to fend for himself on his own in nature.
Around the same time he took up hobbies such as candle-making, archaeology, cooking, astronomy, electronics, short-wave radio and ham radio, stone polishing, jewellery-making, gliding, diving, snorkelling, football, hockey all forms of metalwork, carpentry and wood-turning, plumbing, electrics, car repairs – particularly bodywork and respraying – cake making and decorating, cleaning…. the list goes on and on and on and he took these all up to quite a serious degree and somehow, they were all linked though John didn’t realise it at the time.
When John was 11 he moved from London to Leicester so his Dad could take up a position as a lecturer at a teacher training college; every Saturday his Dad used to go in to the college in the morning to complete work and John would go with him and play on one of the early PDP computers that the college had invested in; it worked using punch cards and punch tape and he learned COBOL and Fortran which set him in good stead for some of the hobbies that he took on later, including an early programming of very simple games that he used to run on the family’s small B&W TV from some of the electronic circuits that he created. John also (allegedly) later became a hacker, a ‘phreaker’ as it was known, using tone-phones and POP nodes to play around in the very early days of the net in the mid-‘70s.
Jump on till John was 18 and he moved from Leicester immediately after his A-levels which finished really early (they finished in mid-May) and moved down to Devon to the edge of Dartmoor to a place called Lydford – very beautiful. It had two pubs and John worked in one of them. Starting as a barman and cellarman, for a variety of reasons he ended up becoming the chef helper; cooking is one of his hobbies and it turned out that he was pretty good and became the full-time chef at the Dartmoor Inn from June until October of that year before he went up to university. And during every break from university possible!
John always wanted to be an architect though was put off by doing a couple of weeks work experience by the people who he thought were really old at the time – they were probably about 27-28 who said: ‘John you don’t want to end up doing what we’re doing designing sewerage systems for council blocks or classroom extensions. So, he did Physics, Maths & Psychology instead at Leicester University (from where he’d come, and his parents were now 267 miles away – Yay!) and thought that would be a pretty good option.
He did Psychology – to be honest – because there were no girls on astrophysics or geophysics and also his father had been educational psychologist with lots of friends who were very skilled and experienced psychologists. John babysit for one who was a famous psychologist looking at the psychology of space sickness for NASA, his wife was a sex therapist and Scandinavian lady and they had this fascinating and chic house full of wonderful books; John used to exchange babysitting for being able to read and borrow books, and so developed a great interest in psychology and that’s always remained, actually psychology and philosophy are still great interests to John.
He got good degree and went on to do a PhD in Nuclear Physics and Semiconductor theory at Aston University in Birmingham; that was an interesting career path to take and John was awarded a CASE award (which meant he got paid, very well, to be an industrially-placed doctoral student) and he did his PhD pretty much all on his own because he fell out big time with his supervisor, who again he thought was really old – probably only about 50 – he just seemed so old and he wanted John to do his version of John’s PhD, John wanted to do John’s version of John’s PhD so barely saw his supervisor again until he submitted his bound thesis!
It was a massive thesis where John had done everything himself – typing it up on one of the first Mac computers in the country – which generated, in essence, two theses-in-one – one covering the nuclear physics part of the work, the other semiconductor theory. John had a comparatively short and thorough viva (thesis defence) and came away with a PhD with not a single correction.
Immediately after his PhD John entered a competition to design the gas flow sensor for what was going to be the modern smart meter for domestic gas metering – he was one of five competition winners, sponsored by British Gas. John did that for couple of years as a post-doctoral project at King’s College London with British Gas Research Station London and Loughborough. John was uninspired when his device – that worked – was not chosen for the meter and another sensor (from some super-famous Prof at Oxford) was chosen, even though it didn’t work!
So when John was headhunted to go work for De Beers Industrial Diamond Division (part of De Beers Diamond Trading Company and part-owned by Anglo-American Corporation, the behemoth mining company) to develop a potentially diamond-industry-shattering technology – making man-made diamond indistinguishable from natural diamonds using new semiconductor technology, an impossible and improbable feat he jumped at the chance.
John was 28, given almost £3.5million to begin with (in 1989 that was a lot of money!) and five people to work with me in a tailor-made laboratory and told to ‘ just go play and come-up with something to shock us.
Over a comparatively short time of 4 years he very proudly invented and developed the technology that creates man-made diamonds – lab grown diamonds as they’re now known – and was very successful, creating an entirely new industry – and potentially meeting his main goal to eliminate the need for destroying huge tracts through mining. Some of the greatest times of his life and greatest opportunities happened from this project.
It was a fabulous company to work for, John stayed with De Beers for 12 years, had five different careers and ended-up developing an entirely new material which was very interesting because it’s an electrically conductive pure polycrystalline diamond that can’t exist in nature.
This is now used as the cutting tool element where everything – pretty much everything – electronic is machined with; every iPhone (most of all smartphones, laptop screens, TV screens….) has been machined in large part using this material; have wood flooring that doesn’t let water in! Because of this material planes are cleaner and faster, it does make cars more efficient and is used in all sorts of applications. John had a fantastic time travelling the world and selling the product he’d invented in a lab., taken through trials and pilot production through to full production at scale and profit. Enormous fun!
Continuous travel takes its toll and John left in 2002 because, quite frankly, being 12 years with the company was only bearable because he had lots of different jobs, ending-up being an occasional trouble-shooter for Anglo-American with other very interesting projects that took him around the world.
Towards the end of 2001 John was still travelling all around the world and his wife said: “John in the last six months we’ve seen you (he had a 5-year-old son) for 16 days and no two days have been consecutive”. She wanted more children (John wanted more children) and was using Air Miles as a form of contraception.
About to be made a main board adviser, about to be made an ambassador for the new brand he said to De Beers he wanted to leave; it was a protracted affair, it took six months to leave and when he left he had to sign a very long (7 years) and extensive nondisclosure agreement; being paid-off well enabled John to immediately go to Cambridge to do their ‘Ignite’ entrepreneurship course which was a wonderful opportunity offered by Hunter Centre of Entrepreneurship at Strathclyde University, part-sponsored by a friend in exchange for work done for her in a study she was doing. That was the beginning of the Innovation Foundry, John’s boutique disruptive innovations management consultancy.
Running the Innovation Foundry was enormous fun for 3 years, John had 2 more children and looked after hearth, home and the children as a ‘Domestic God’.
All was fabulous until he had to stop, wake-up and get a job since John’s 3rd child – Arthur – was born with a serious heart defect and he had to go get a real job while his wife cared for Arthur after his open heart surgery at 5 months old (Arthur’s now a very healthy 14-year-old). Scary times. John went to work for a trade association – the Manufacturing Technology Association – which basically meant John build the association’s membership of manufacturing technologies companies – the companies that make the machines that make machines such as milling machines, multi-axis lathes, forming machines, grinding machines, cutting tools…. – all linked to all his previous experience and some of his hobbies.
It also offered John the opportunity to set up trading offices all around the world – he set one up in Bangalore India, one in Shanghai (which was a satellite of one that the MTA already had in Beijing) a consultancy office in San Paolo Brazil and his favourite was one in Yekaterinburg in western Siberia; he spent quite a lot of time travelling the world going between the offices, taking trade missions and receiving trade missions to the UK but after a few years John got pretty tired of too much travelling, his wife’s business was just about to take off and so he went back and did three years of, basically, a career break to look after the children, house and home again (bliss), helping build a forum for parents of children with special educational needs until he was headhunted by UK government to go work for what was the Technology Strategy Board, now Innovate UK.
He also did another experiment: finding out what it’s like to support a family with no income, no support and using state services to find a job and sign-on for income support, housing benefit and so on. One of the most debilitating and depressing times of my life, 7 months of sheer hell and heartache, fear and loathing. John gained a clear insight into just how hard it is to navigate the UK welfare state. And just what it can do to self-esteem, creativity, health, fitness…… and will to live.
An easier experiment: At InnovateUK John launched and developed the UK government’s emerging technologies and industries programme – a major project to find new disruptive technologies that government should invest in that they hadn’t already invested in. This involved a huge amount of analysis and landscaping and developing a whole algorithm to look at attractiveness for UK investment – it was a really successful project, out of that came four of the ‘8 Great Technologies’, one of which is called Synthetic Biology and the UK Technologies Strategy was launched in 2012. John was also integral in securing a huge amount of investment – £688 million – to put into these eight great technologies development (and overall, we’ve had £327 million in synthetic biology since 2010).
John happily left InnovateUK in 2012 and went to work for Imperial College London where he started to commercialise some of the synthetic biology technology coming out of Imperial College.
The next year John started running a new centre which he helped to formulate – SynbiCITE – to commercialise the UKs synthetic biology R&D from any university or start-up across the UK with the aim to create a new industry based on using synthetic biology to be worth £1bn turnover in the UK by 2020, which was achieved in January 2019. We’ve started 26 start-ups and created 9 spin-outs, trained more than 350 academics to become more entrepreneurial and run masterclasses in IP, ethics and responsible innovation, storytelling, pitching training and much, much more.
John’s also a Fellow at Cambridge Judge business School, teaching the Intellectual Property for Entrepreneurship electives for the CJBS Masters’ programmes; he also runs the world’s oldest technology networking company – the Real Time Club – 53 years old this year running 7-8 events where we have auspicious and esteemed speakers from all sorts of new technology with a membership which is 650 odd people.
John’s a Chartered Mathematician and Chartered Physicist, member of all-sorts of professional bodies and a consummate network builder as a result.
He’s recently become a member of the government’s Machine Intelligence Garage Ethics Advisory Committee for the Digital Catapult; for biotechnology John leads on embedding ethical and responsible innovation in practice into businesses, particularly start-ups.
John’s a member of all 7 of the government’s Programme Expert Groups for the National Measurement System (which manages all forms of measurement for the UK in every area), is a director and advisor of medical imaging company, a bacteriophage manufacturing company, and a patron of patron of all sorts of places like Hampstead Theatre, part of the Artistic Director’s Circle for Dance Umbrella (Europe’s largest and most prestigious contemporary dance festival), a Patron at the Science Museum and Royal Institution, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, Commerce and Manufactures (RSA).
John loves theatre, opera, dance and ballet, dancing, music, film, reading and entertaining and attends and participates in these regularly – weekly when we’re not in ‘lockdown’.