How great it was to see an engineer win The Apprentice this week.  It was a small victory for all the design and product engineers out there who spend their days poring over computers, models and prototypes and actually spend their days making something.  The product designers here at Mila certainly contribute a massive amount to this business.

It may have been a nail file – or was it a chair – which eventually won it for Tom Pellereau but at least it was a tangible product which showed creativity and inventiveness. 

The world economies which are doing well at the moment are the Germans and the Chinese – both of them built on a culture of designing and manufacturing products.  If the British economy is to get itself out of the doldrums we probably need to see the engineers beating the lawyers, accountants and bankers a bit more often.

Whatever you might think about Alan Sugar and some of the clowns who demonstrate an embarrassing lack of business skills or even basic common sense on The Apprentice, it was encouraging to see that in the final programme he picked the bright spark who actually wanted to make something.

Richard