Heard the one about the two Englishman, the German, the Austrian and the two Poles?

Cambridge UK. September 2020. Lucy Jordan, aged eight, is starting her first day at iSchool – the Cambridge School of Science & Technology Engineering to be precise.

Unwanted tags are hard to shake off. Manufacturing is grubby and engineers mess about with engines smeared with oil and grease.

Send for the swarfega which, as Wikipedia helpfully advises, “is a brand of heavy-duty hand cleaner used in engineering and other oily, dirty, manual trades, such as printing.”

Perpetuate that myth and misconception. For our definition we prefer to lean on another Wiki definition close by – that the word engine actually derives from the Latin ingenium meaning “innate quality, especially mental power, hence a clever invention.”

Or to dress it up in its full Sunday attire: “Engineering is the discipline, art, skill, profession, and technology of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.”

That’s better – all good, clean ingenuity and not a hint of grime in sight. Which is exactly what engineering is and the image it deserves to convey. Think pulley, think pyramids.

Respecting the profession of engineering in its broadest sense is highly relevant, for a number of reasons, to Cambridge and vitally important to the economic health of the UK.

More and more respected technology entrepreneurs and investors are realising the worth of engineering brains in optimising innovation and unlocking value within entire businesses.

Professor Andy Hopper, who heads Cambridge University’s world-renowned Computer Laboratory, vocalised the view – chatting informally after the recent Computer Lab Ring AGM – that his ideal spin-out from the lab would be based in and steered from the UK and certainly have no offshore investment and interference. And he added – their FDs would be engineers!

Professor Hopper has since expanded on that line of thought. He told me: “The Ubisense CFO Gordon Campbell did engineering at Cambridge. As a consequence he has a very good feel for how financial changes may effect the company both from an expansion and, were there to be one, contraction point of view; ie realistic expansion and non-precipitous downsizing.

“Furthermore when he plans budgets his engineering experience is always at the back of his mind so as to make them more realistic and achievable. I think one can generalise from this and suggest engineering is a good underpinning for many roles in a hi-tech business.”

One long-standing Cambridge serial entrepreneur who has a dozen ventures on the go at present told me that he wanted more engineers involved in the businesses – “because they want to see a product at the end of the innovation and a clear pathway to making that product.”

He’d had enough of blue skies thinkers wandering around smelling the daisies while engineers would have thought of a mass production strategy for daisies – a daisy chain perhaps – and developed an entire agricultural business based on the field in which they were growing!

There are other clear clues to the growing influence of engineers in building scaleable international companies. They are critical to our companies’ ability to maximise opportunities in the burgeoning Machine-to-Machine (M2M) segment where new technologies allow both wireless and wired systems to communicate with other devices of the same ability.

They are critical to the many and varied industry-specific ecosystems that are being created, often with Cambridge-based businesses in the driving seat: ideaSpace company PragmatIC in the field of integrated printed electronics products; ARM in a whole range of sectors; Pfizer, MedImmune and Amgen in Life Sciences; Hexcel in materials composites.

The ability of Cambridge and the UK to fully exploit our immense bank of intellectual capital may hinge on successfully changing the whole image of engineering.

There is an argument for gearing a sizeable proportion of our education system to stimulating engineering as a career; driving down the message that engineering is a top profession to children in our primary schools – and ensuring prime remuneration for those who pursue the dream.

In China, engineers are kings and queens. The profession is revered and the gospel is spread across class and gender boundaries. Engineers are being churned out in China by their thousands.

Perhaps we should go back to the future – to 1750 and a time when Britannia ruled more than the waves. Engineers drove the UK industrial revolution which led the world and then spread to the world – including America.

There wasn’t an area of life that brilliant engineers didn’t touch – from textiles to agricultural machinery to industrial processes; from railways and locomotives to shipbuilding; to electrical power generation.

That capability has endured. It can now be harnessed to engineer a stronger economy and a healthier and wealthier future for the good of all.

If you’d asked most hippies in the swinging sixties to give an example of software, the chances are they would have waved their kaftans in a whirl of weed and a flurry of flora.

New research on the Cambridge technology cluster reveals how wireless and BioMedTech are driving research and product advances, cash generation and jobs growth for the local and UK economies while the CleanTech segment blinks in their vapour trail.

2012 is Alan Turing Year. That may not mean much to a generation weaned on the breast of reality television whose heroes wear sequins.

From Day One of its existence in Cambridge, Microsoft Research has been supportive of the technology cluster and generous in its outreach to the wider community.

Cambridge technology entrepreneurs are being treated like people who agree to donate their bodies to medical research only to have the offers taken up BEFORE they die.

From Roman philosopher Cicero to oil magnate John D.Rockefeller, thrift has always found ready champions. Their wise words on the importance of frugality are in most quotation halls of fame.

October 14 has never been a particularly good day for England on the battlefield. King Harold clearly should have gone to Specsavers rather than Hastings on October 14 1066 when Norman archers killed him with an arrow through the eye.

A young turk on a Cambridge startup programme revealed that his fledgling business was based in Silicon Roundabout and asked why he should entertain thoughts of setting up in Cambridge when his venture could be based in London.

There’s a hole in the ozone layer. Pollution is killing the planet. We need cleaner, greener energy and it has to be paid for.

While it may appear that American high flyers are winging in at G-force to take out Cambridge’s tech top guns there is an element of optical illusion in the high-speed manouevres we’ve been witnessing.

As they have been turning on their taps since 2004, Cambridge householders will not have noticed any ‘Made in Hong Kong’ stickers on their sink tops.

The inaugural Springboard Cambridge programme ended with punts, pints and plaudits and as a show of sheer physical stamina combined with intellectual energy I am struggling to find a parallel in business terms.

Take a deep breath and digest the headline figure again. The new £180 million guided busway is due to open on August 7 – 30 months late and a staggering £65 million over budget.