Interview with Christopher Jameson - the Director

BM. OK Can I just pick up on something you said. You described it as a science discovery centre. I assume there are other places using that term as that as well, how would you describe Techniquest compared to other of these kinds of institutions?

CJ The term science discovery centre hasn't been widely picked up as, with the three words taken together. I think the main distinctions between Techniquest and the similar facilities are these. First of all we do more education than anybody else. We've got a larger education team. We've got a much closer focus on schools' requirements. We make sure that many aspects of the schools' curriculum are supported and enriched by what we offer. And that comes through having - I mean, our funding comes from the Training and Education Department of the National Assembly and the justification for that is that we do education very well. A third of our visitors are from - are schools groups. Doesn't certainly mean that other people don't, don't do it quite well, but they don't have the resource that we have, either in terms of staff or in some cases of the other facilities and they don't have the back-up from public funds that we have to do that.

The second thing that distinguishes Techniquest is that we design and build nearly everything that you see here. There's very little in our exhibition that has been bought in from somewhere else. And we have our house style, we have our own particular pride in the way that we do things. Which is you know not always the best answer to every problem and sometimes it would be quicker and cheaper to buy what we need from another source. But once you've got it, you know what you've got, you've got - you're able to maintain it, you're able to develop it and it adds to the corpus of the the whole offering of the organisation.

The other thing that makes Techniquest unique is probably that - although there is one other organisation that operates two different science centres, we're the only organisation which has deliberately set out, if you like, to establish a Techniquest family of science centres, and as you know we're opening in Wrexham next month. We already have a facility in West Wales and we support a facility in Berkshire. We also have an exhibition that we sold to the Portuguese government which is based in Lisbon and another one that we sold to the South African government which is travelling in various parts of Southern Africa. Now those are perhaps no longer really Techniquest although they're both branded with our name, but we don't have any managerial control over those.

So those are the three things really, education, house in-house development, r&d and production and the greater family of Techniquest facilities.