Sunday Signal: Risk, Reinvention & The Courage to Change
Welcome to The Sunday Signal — a weekly exploration of innovation, industry, and the ideas shaping Britain's future. Issue #3 4 May 2025
⏱️ 5 min read
Welcome to The Sunday Signal — a weekly exploration of innovation, industry, and the ideas shaping Britain's future. I examine the systems that either enable progress or quietly constrain it. This week: how a conversation in Portland revealed valuable lessons about intelligent risk-taking, why South Yorkshire has the essential elements to lead a manufacturing revival, and what England's oldest sheepdog trials teach us about knowledge that endures beyond technological cycles. Three different perspectives converging on a simple truth: Britain possesses remarkable capabilities—we need only the confidence to deploy them differently. The challenge isn't our capacity for change, but our willingness to embrace it with purpose and conviction.
FAILING FAST — AND THE COURAGE TO PIVOT
“Fail fast.”
In Silicon Valley, it’s strategic wisdom. In Britain, it still sounds like giving up.
I’ve spent two decades observing this cultural divide. What Americans call pivoting, we often label retreating. They see ruthless honesty about outcomes; we see uncomfortable admission of mistakes.
Greg Stein, an engineering virtuoso from the Valley, revealed the true meaning over beers in Portland. He told me how Ink Development didn’t just abandon their vision of touchscreen computing — they transformed it into eShop, one of the earliest serious attempts at e-commerce.
Among their team was a developer named Pierre Omidyar.
Their willingness to change course didn’t diminish their ambition — it amplified their impact. When eShop was later acquired by Microsoft, Omidyar took the experience and lessons from that pivot into his next project: AuctionWeb, which became eBay.
Product–market fit rarely arrives in its original packaging.
It emerges through iteration, experimentation, and the courage to recognise when your solution doesn’t match the problem.
The British innovation ecosystem has extraordinary technical talent. What we lack isn’t capability — it’s velocity: the speed at which we identify dead ends and redirect resources toward promising pathways.
In our complex technological landscape, the capacity to fail purposefully — with measurement, honesty and strategic intent — isn’t weakness.
It’s the cornerstone of transformation.
MANUFACTURING SOVEREIGNTY — NOT JUST JOBS
The irony wasn’t lost on anyone at the Digital Forge event.
A £400 million wind farm — the largest in England and Wales — now powers 15% of Welsh homes. Yet, as Professor Keith Ridgway pointed out, the only British-made components may have been the coffee and sandwiches served at the ribbon cutting.
This isn’t just about lost jobs. It’s about surrendering industrial sovereignty.
When we import flat-packed trains from Japan for assembly instead of building them ourselves, we’re not just signing trade deals — we’re signing away our future.
America understood this a decade ago. Their reindustrialisation push isn’t protectionism — it’s strategic vision in a fragmented world. And it’s not dictated from Washington. It’s driven by place-based initiatives that build regional manufacturing ecosystems.
South Yorkshire is ideally positioned to lead Britain’s manufacturing renaissance. We have:
World-class research institutions
Proud industrial heritage
Available land
A skilled, ambitious workforce
The newly formed South Yorkshire Regional Defence & Security Cluster represents exactly what’s needed: a serious framework that unites research, industry, supply chains, and public investment.
This isn’t a policy press release. It’s a call for long-term commitment:
Education aligned with industrial needs
Planning rules that enable growth
Patient capital
Competitive energy costs
After decades of being marginalised, manufacturing is finding its voice again — not through nostalgia, but through a vision of advanced, sovereign industry rooted in place and purpose.
The path from vulnerability to strength runs directly through our region.
The time to forge it is now.
🎟️ Register for Digital Forge on 8 May
📍 1 Rowland Street, Sheffield
🐑 THE BLESSING OF THE SHEEP: TIMELESS IN A DIGITAL WORLD
As you read this, I'll be standing in the churchyard of St Peter's at Chatsworth for the annual Blessing of the Sheep — a prelude to something much more significant.
As President of the Longshaw Sheepdog Trials (the oldest in England), I'm reminded that some traditions aren't merely quaint relics but repositories of intergenerational wisdom.
Picture this: morning mist lifting over the Derbyshire hills, revealing a landscape virtually unchanged for centuries. A shepherd stands poised at the gate, her dog alert at her feet. With subtle whistles and calls that carry across the valley, she directs her partner, a border collie whose ancestors have worked these same hills for thirty generations. The dog moves with calculated precision, reading the flock's collective mind, anticipating their movements before they happen.
What you're witnessing isn't just a competition. It's a sophisticated communication system between human, animal, and landscape — evolved over centuries and impossible to replicate with technology alone. This is knowledge that lives in muscle memory, in terrain-reading, in the subtle psychology of both dog and sheep.
The Longshaw Sheepdog Trials (28–30 August 2025) represent Britain's oldest continuous dialogue between our agricultural heritage and our present. They embody intelligence that's contextual, embodied, and irreplaceable — knowledge earned through practice rather than downloaded through updates.
Join us in Derbyshire. Bring your boots. Witness not just a competition, but the living transmission of wisdom that deserves protection precisely because it exists beyond our digital reach.
FINAL THOUGHTS: THE COURAGE TO CHOOSE DIFFERENTLY
A nation that punishes pivots will never achieve breakthroughs.
An economy that designs without making becomes merely a blueprint for others’ prosperity.
And a society that abandons its timeless traditions loses the very context that gives innovation meaning.
What connects these threads isn’t nostalgia — it’s necessity.
In a world fragmenting into regional ecosystems, the capacity to reinvent, rebuild, and remember becomes a strategic imperative rather than a sentimental choice.
Perhaps our greatest challenge isn’t technological at all — it’s summoning the collective courage to reimagine what Britain can be:
A place that values both rapid iteration and generational wisdom.
That builds what it designs.
That understands how deep roots enable the tallest growth.
Let’s be that country again.
Thanks for reading,
— David Richards
David Richards MBE is a technology entrepreneur, educator, and commentator. The Sunday Signal offers weekly insights at the intersection of technology, society, and human potential.
© 2025 David Richards. All rights reserved.