Incoming IET president Warren East has refocused on helping smaller businesses grow alongside their novel technologies.

There can’t be many in the engineering community that haven’t heard of Warren East. An engineer and business executive of vast and prestigious experience, he’s steered the ship at both ARM and Rolls-Royce, while watching over the third and fourth industrial revolutions and changes in attitudes to how we manufacture and work. He’s also played a big role in the digitisation of the technology landscape, as well as shifts in environmental outlooks and cultures.

East retired from “full-time exec stuff” at the end of 2022. But rather than take up golf or grow wine, his ambition evolved into developing “a portfolio of non-exec activity”. More than that, he “wanted a substantial portion of it – not all of it – to be associated with energy transition, or mitigating the impact of climate change”. East says that he draws a careful distinction between the two environmental concepts...