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About
Mike Redwood
mike@mikeredwood.com |
As we move through 2004 you find me working as an adviser in Marketing Strategy, Technology Management and Innovation in the leather industry and elsewhere. If you think I can help just email.
I am researching with the IMP Group (www.impgroup.org) at the School of Management, University of Bath, England on business-to-business marketing. My research area relates to the leather and associated industries both present but also taking a longitudinal view at the industry over long periods of time. This allows an examination of the way industrial networks have evolved through entire technological cycles, such as chrome tanning.
Currently I am the Visiting Professor in Business Development at Leather at the University College Northampton and Deputy Editor-in –Chief of World Leather, World Footwear, and World Sports Activewear. This keeps me in touch with the leather and sports industries.
I have worked in the industry all my life, as did my father for most of his. I studied Leather Science at the University of Leeds just as the course was declining in popularity in the late sixties. Indeed I was the only undergraduate student in my year. Not a very good student, either, as I spent a lot of my time debating and fighting Jack Straw - the current British Foreign Secretary - in student politics. I was Student President of the Union in 1969.
Since then I have had an exciting time with some great people and great companies in the leather industry. I worked in Santa Croce in Italy, had an outstanding time with ADOC in El Salvador, as well as with fine companies such as Pittards plc in the UK where I was proud to have served as Marketing Director for quite a number of years. Remember the “Finest Leather on Earth”? I also worked for ECCO and for FootJoy.
I have always been keen to learn and to talk about the leather industry and am a Fellow of the Society of Leather Technologists and Chemists and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Manufactures. My work with the RSA is based around my interest in innovation and the future of work. It is a real honour to be a Fellow of an organization who had Sir Humphrey Davy a member, the more so when you remember that in 1802-1804 Sir Humphrey had done so much work on vegetable tanning materials.
My MBA came from the University of Bath, where I retain a great interest in the history of technology in the leather industry, how it compares to others such as ice and bicycles, and to the vital importance of networks in industry-to-industry marketing an innovation.
We say we are living in a time of change. I suppose that this is true in as much as all times involve change, although I am far from convinced that it is as much as most of our forefathers saw. What is true is that the leather industry has seen big development in the last half century and has more to come. Up until now they have been more structural than chemical, but from now on I expect to see much bigger changes in technology and process.