Media File: 1983
Sinclair in the News

Business Week
October 17, 1983

Sir Clive's Very Big Gamble On A Very Small TV

Sir Clive Sinclar, probably Britain's best-known living inventor, unveiled his pocket-size television last month with characteristic cockiness. Declaring that his 2-in. TV was lighter, cheaper, and brighter than anything on the market, he predicted it would do for television what the transistor had done for radio.

Bravura is Sinclair's stock in trade - even when facing rivals that dwarf his $82 million company, as he does in the promising market for take-it-with-you TV sets. This time, though, Sinclair - who says that he watches TV only "once in a blue moon" - has more than usual at stake, and he faces an uphill fight. Although the company has already received more than 1,000 orders, its TV, which initially will sell for $120, is currently available only by mail order in Britain. By contrast, Sony's $167 Watchman, Seiko's $500 TV-wristwatch, and Casio's $200 pocket version will be in U.S. stores in time for the Christmas shopping season. Sinclair is planning to introduce a $99 version in the U.S., but not until late 1984.

MARATHONS

Sinclair has had his share of disasters in the past, including failures with digital watches, portable calculators, and even an earlier version of a pocket TV. In most instances, he was outpaced by either faster-moving or lower-cost producers.

Today, however, Sinclair is riding high on the phenomenal success of his midget computers. The under-$100 units brought computers to the British masses and made four-year-old Sinclair Research Ltd. a household name. Sales of the privately held company doubled last year, while its pretax profits rose 64% to $21 million.

For inventing computers that thousands of Britons could at last afford, Sinclair won knighthood as well as hero status in a nation committed to reviving entrepreneurial spirit. "He has given enormous confidence to everyone," says Kenneth Baker, Britain's Information Technology Minister. "He has proved that we don't have to lie back and let the Japanese roll over us."

Over the years, Sinclair, 43, has evolved an approach to product development that is surprisingly aggressive for such a small company. And that process stems from the company's unique culture. Sinclair, who is chairman of the British chapter of Mensa, the high-IQ society, sets a curiously mixed tone for his company, which is housed in a converted Victorian mineral water bottling plant in Cambridge. A company bike substitutes for a company car, and marathon running in an annual company-sponsored race is nearly de rigueur for the mostly under-40 staff. (He himself has twice raced in the New York City marathon.)

But at the same time, he pays top salaries and "is not frightened of spending money" on research, says an insider. In two years, Sinclair Research has nearly tripled in size to 70 employees, and its projects now range from a professional computer, slated for introduction next year, to ambitious long-term ventures into telecommunications and robotics.

Despite his love of the limelight, Sinclair has built an organization that relies heavily on teamwork. While he claims credit for all basic ideas, once a new product is conceived, he brings together a handful of people who lay out a development plan and divide the tasks among themselves. "We have our own brainstorming session, then we fill in the details," says Jim Westwood, a Sinclair director. Westwood helped develop the proprietary design that made it possible to put the little TV's circuitry onto a single silicon chip.

And unlike large companies, where products under development typically are passed from one group to the next, Sinclair Research allows the same team to take an idea all the way from planning to design to marketing. To Sinclair, continuity is critical to maintaining momentum. When different people are involved in different phases, he points out, there is unnecessary overlap because each group must document why the last one did what it did. At the same time, teams that work from scratch to completion tend to have "enormous dedication," he says. "The trick is to have small groups, reasonably isolated."

PRODUCTION DELAYS

Westwood, who has been with Sinclair for 20 years, says that this autonomy - along with the cachet of working for one of Britain's premier high-tech companies - is a key element in attracting top people. And because the company does not have a massive structure, he adds, "it moves quickly." Minister Baker claims that the technique has inspired other companies. Sinclair has had "a stimulative effect" on British business, he says. "The small-team approach is the way forward for lots of young companies."

One such team at Sinclair developed the flat tube that gives the new mini-TV its svelte 1¼-in. thickness. The tubes could not be manufactured with conventional technology, so the same team developed a new process.

The need to invent such manufacturing techniques contributed to production delays at a tube plant that Sinclair designed in Dundee, Scotland. Learning from past mistakes, he decided not to have his own company run the facility and contracted it out to Timex Corp., which builds Sinclair's computers. But then a six-week strike at Dundee further pushed back the debut for the 5½ x 3½-in. television, originally scheduled for introduction in the fall of 1982.

Sinclair Research relies on outside design collaboration, as well as outright purchase, for its success. For instance, the design for the TV's single-chip circuitry was developed over two years by engineers at Sinclair working with digitalization specialists at Ferranti Electronics Ltd. Finding the right battery for the TV came by fluke. Sinclair happened to be visiting Polaroid Corp.'s Boston laboratory just at the time when a powerful new film-pack battery cell was under development. Sinclair snapped up early rights to the wafer-thin lithium cell because its 15-hour life expectancy is several times that of the cells in rival mini-TVs.

'BLUE SKY' PROJECTS

With the TV now on the market, Sinclair, characteristically, is preoccupied with ideas for other products - among them, an electric car. Unlike some inventors-turned-businessmen, he still spends only a few hours a day on business matters. "The office routine is an interruption to what I see as my real work," he says, "which is thinking."

Meanwhile, Sinclair continues to build for the future. Nearly all of last year's profits are going into research and development. One of the company's three laboratories will be replaced by a brand-new facility, called Metalab, built in an 18th century house in Milton. It will contain $150,000 worth of equipment and material per researcher. This lab, which Sinclair says is for such "blue sky" projects as a fifth-generation computer, will have computer-aided design machines and a pilot semiconductor fabrication line for building proprietary chips from scratch.