Vacuums needn’t look as good nor function as well as James Dyson makes them, but for decades he’s been creating dust-busting appliances that rival Apple’s greatest designs. He probably won’t stop, even if you ask him nicely. From Shoshana Berger’s new Wired Q&A with the inventor:

“Wired: 

Now that Dyson is a sprawling, multinational corporation, how do you keep the spirit of innovation alive?

James Dyson: 

We try to make the corporation like the garage. We don’t have technicians; our engineers and scientists actually go and build their own prototypes and test the rigs themselves. And the reason we do that—and I don’t force people to do that, by the way, they want to do it—is that when you’re building the prototype, you start to really understand how it’s made and what it might do and where its weaknesses might be. If you merely hand a drawing to somebody and say, ‘Would you make this, please?’ and in two weeks he comes back with it and you hand it to someone else who does the test, you’re not experiencing it. You’re not understanding it. You’re not feeling it. Our engineers and scientists love doing that.

Wired: 

Do they ever fail?

James Dyson: 

Absolutely. It’s when something fails that you learn. If it doesn’t fail, you don’t learn anything. You haven’t made any progress. Everything I do is a mistake. It fails. For the past 42 years—I’ve had a life of it.”