Failure is interesting,” Dyson tells entrepreneur.com. “It’s part of making progress. You never learn from success, but you do learn from failure. I started out with a simple idea, and by the end it got much more audacious and interesting. I got to a place I never could have imagined because I learned what worked and didn’t work. We have to embrace failure and almost get a kick out of it. Not in a perverse way, but in a problem-solving way.”

Design graduate Dyson’s ultimately-successful problem-solving experiments began in 1979. “I’d purchased what claimed to be the most powerful vacuum cleaner on the market,” he tells inc.com. “But it was essentially useless. Rather than sucking up the dirt, it pushed it around the room. I’d seen an industrial sawmill which used something called a cyclonic separator to remove dust from the air, and I thought the same principle of separation might work on a vacuum cleaner. I rigged up a quick prototype, and it did.”

It took five years and a further five thousand one hundred and twenty-six prototypes to perfect his design, and almost another decade of failed licensing deals and countless fruitless meetings with distributors before Dyson’s Dual Cyclone vacuum cleaner finally went on sale in the UK in 1993.

Having failed to interest any manufacturers in the design, Dyson had mortgaged his house to set up his own manufacturing plant. “I liked living on the edge,” he says. “All those years that my house was in hock to the bank… I liked the danger, the idea that everything depended on getting that next product right in every way.”

By 1996 the business was growing rapidly and he needed to consider new management strategies. “I had to bring in outside talent in a major way,” he says. “I didn’t enjoy being CEO that much. At an operational level, that became an enormous job, too big for me. I’ve never really been a businessman. I