At one point, ITM Power struggled to raise £3 million. Dr Graham Cooley recalls how one fund manager’s backing helped keep the business from running out of cash.

Years later, it raised £250 million in a single round.

Between those moments lay years of patient investors, difficult decisions and industrial partnerships that changed the company’s prospects.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE speaks to the former ITM Power chief executive about the journey from physicist to technology entrepreneur, and the difference between inventing something remarkable and building a business around it.

Graham grew up in Slough with a mother who taught maths and science and a father, the engineer and trade unionist Mike Cooley, who believed technology should serve people. His father gave him a conviction that stayed with him: the future is not something we wait for. It is something we build.

His career took him into the electricity industry, pioneering energy storage, Cambridge startups and the hard commercial lessons of turning research into products. He recalls a three-year intellectual-property battle that ended with the opposing company becoming an investor, and why access to experienced entrepreneurs and the right backers can change a business’s future.

Then came ITM.

Graham explains why he stopped fuel-cell development to concentrate on electrolysers, how partnerships with Linde and Snam unlocked institutional investment, and the long climb from a £12 million market valuation to a peak of £3.5 billion. He also discusses building manufacturing capacity in Sheffield and recognising when the next stage required a different chief executive.

Along the way, he challenges Britain’s approach to energy. His argument is that electricity cannot be considered in isolation: storage, gas networks, hydrogen and industrial demand must be planned together. The technology matters. So do the incentives that determine whether anyone builds it.

Part One is about turning science into industry. Part Two asks who will finance Britain’s next generation of businesses, with a focus on UK stock markets, pensions and growth capital.

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A 14-year-old refuses to study a Van Gogh painting because they are convinced it was generated by artificial intelligence.
Children challenge their teachers with incorrect answers from ChatGPT. Young boys disappear into the online manosphere, absorbing misogyny, conspiracy theories and the belief that figures such as Andrew Tate offer the answers adults cannot.
This is no longer a future problem.
In Part Two of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE continues his conversation with Dr Carolina Scarton, Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, about what misinformation is doing to children, classrooms and democracy.
Carolina explains how engagement algorithms amplify anger, fear and division, why online extremism can move into the physical world, and how social media companies shift responsibility onto users while continuing to profit from the systems that created the problem.
But the greater danger may not be believing what is false.
It may be losing the ability to believe anything at all.
The conversation examines the collapse of trust in teachers, scientists, journalists and institutions, and the risk of a generation treating AI as an oracle while dismissing human expertise. Carolina argues that banning smartphones or social media will not solve the problem. The stronger answer is education.
She describes Finland’s approach to media literacy, where children learn to investigate claims, recognise manipulation and act as their own fact-checkers. She makes the case for teaching AI literacy in British schools so young people understand that a large language model is a tool built from data and probability, not an all-knowing source of truth.
The discussion then moves into cognitive warfare, foreign interference and the deliberate flooding of the information environment with so much noise that society becomes paralysed. Carolina reveals how researchers identified Russian-linked propaganda operations through posting patterns, Russian bank holidays and traces left behind in website metadata.
She also addresses the decisions being made inside the world’s largest technology companies, the removal of ethics teams, the use of AI in warfare and what happens when extraordinary technological power is concentrated among people drawn from the same narrow demographic.
This is a conversation about children, education and artificial intelligence.
But ultimately, it is about whether democracy can survive when people no longer share a basic understanding of reality.
Carolina’s closing message is simple:
Keep going. Do not give up.
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The algorithm did not decide to divide us.

Someone built it to make money.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE sits down with Dr Carolina Scarton, Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, to examine how misinformation evolved from playground rumours into a global industry.

The conversation begins far from Silicon Valley. Carolina grew up in a modest family in rural Brazil, where her parents placed education above everything else. Her journey took her from public school to the University of São Paulo, then Cambridge and Sheffield, helped along the way by teachers and mentors who saw what she was capable of.

There is even an extraordinary family connection to Pelé. Carolina still owns a trophy bearing the footballer’s name from the years when her grandfather played alongside him as a boy in Brazil.

Then the discussion turns to artificial intelligence.

Carolina explains what Natural Language Processing really is, why systems such as ChatGPT can appear to understand us without understanding anything at all, and why so-called AI hallucinations are the predictable output of statistical models rather than machines losing touch with reality.

She also reveals the hidden human labour behind AI safeguards, including poorly paid workers exposed to disturbing material while labelling the content technology companies do not want their models to reproduce.

But the central question is not how AI works.

It is who profits when it goes wrong.

David and Carolina explore engagement algorithms, echo chambers, Cambridge Analytica, Brexit, deepfakes and the extraordinary case of a Muslim man in Pakistan reportedly earning around $1,500 a month by producing AI-generated Islamophobic content about Keir Starmer.

He was not trying to change Britain.

He was optimising for engagement.

Carolina’s conclusion is blunt. The algorithm is only a tool. To understand why misinformation spreads, follow the money.

In Part Two, the conversation moves into schools, the manosphere, collapsing trust in evidence, smartphone bans, Finland’s approach to media literacy and whether AI can help defend truth from the industry it helped create.

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In Part One, Pam Liversidge proved that women belonged in engineering.

In Part Two, she changes the institutions that once excluded them.

In 1997, Pam became the first female President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in its 150-year history. She did not treat the position as a ceremonial prize. She used it to challenge an organisation she believed had become too academic, too elitist and too distant from the practical engineers who founded it.

Her Moving Forward programme opened the institution to people from vocational and non-traditional routes and created a strategy that guided it for the next decade.

But that was only one glass ceiling.

In this episode of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE follows Pam through medical engineering, the creation of a new forum bringing engineers and clinicians together, her year as High Sheriff of South Yorkshire and the moment she became the first female Master Cutler in the Cutlers’ Company’s 387-year history.

Pam reflects on the pressure of being the first woman, knowing that any mistake might be used against those who came after her. She also reveals how it felt to move from President of an international engineering institution to Mistress Cutler during Doug’s year in office, before the roles were reversed and he became her Consort.

This is not simply a story about breaking glass ceilings. It is about what Pam did after breaking them.

She widened access. Modernised institutions. Championed women through WISE. Helped young people see engineering as a career. And became such an important figure in Sheffield that the University named an engineering building after her.

Looking back at the young woman who entered a lecture theatre as the only female engineering student among 120 men, Pam’s advice is strikingly simple:

“Don’t worry so much.”

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In 1967, Pam Liversidge walked into an engineering lecture at Aston University and found around 120 students.

She was the only woman.

For weeks, many of the men barely spoke to her. An Army recruiter had already dismissed her ambitions with five words: “Girls don’t do engineering.”

Pam stayed.

In Part One of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE traces her journey from a practical, working-class family in Shropshire to the factory floors and boardrooms of British industry.

Pam talks candidly about the isolation of being the only woman on her course, the determination it took to complete her degree, and the reality of entering engineering at a time when women were rarely expected, welcomed or rewarded equally.

At one company, a male colleague doing the same job was paid roughly twice her salary. The explanation was blunt: he had a family, while Pam’s husband worked. At another, she was told there would never be a woman manager in the business.

Each time, she voted with her feet and moved forward.

Her career took her through GKN, some of Sheffield’s toughest industrial workplaces, aerospace forging, compressor blades for Rolls-Royce engines, technical sales and the transformation of Britain’s electricity industry. Along the way, she learned that engineering is not only about machinery, materials and mathematics.

It is about people.

Pam also tells the other side of her first encounter with Doug Liversidge. She was late to his first management meeting because she was trying to keep a 1,000-ton press working. He greeted her by demanding to know who the hell she was.

It was not an obvious beginning to a marriage and industrial partnership lasting more than four decades.

Part One closes with Doug presenting Pam with another of his ambitious ideas and an offer she describes as impossible to refuse.

In Part Two, that decision leads to entrepreneurship, medical technology, institutional reform and two historic firsts: President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and Master Cutler of Sheffield.

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Doug Liversidge had transformed a struggling Sheffield engineering company into a £17 million business, taken it public and delivered a remarkable return for its shareholders.

Then the company was sold.

Three weeks later, he was told to leave.

He was 57 years old and suddenly unemployed.

That same evening, Buckingham Palace called. Prince Charles wanted to visit the factory within days. Doug agreed to return, put on what he calls his “marathon smile” and guide the Prince around the company that had consumed 17 years of his life, without revealing that he had just been forced out.

It could have been the end of his career.

Instead, it became another beginning.

In Part Two of The Digital Forge, David Richards MBE continues Doug’s extraordinary story. He explains how he and Pam moved from an awkward first meeting to a marriage and business partnership lasting more than four decades. He recalls turning around Thornton Precision Engineering, increasing the price of a Rolls-Royce component from £1.50 to £20, taking the business public, buying and selling technology companies, and navigating some of the hardest negotiations of his career.

After losing his executive role, Doug reinvented himself again. He helped commercialise research at the University of Sheffield, created Fusion IP, chaired Surgical Innovations, backed medical technology and helped build the regional innovation infrastructure that Sheffield benefits from today.

He also reflects on becoming Master Cutler, watching Pam later break a centuries-old glass ceiling as the first woman to hold the role, fighting to establish Longley Park Sixth Form College, leading Sheffield’s World Cup host-city bid, and writing the story he wanted to leave for his grandchildren.

Part One was about how Doug Liversidge found his way into industry.

Part Two is about what he did when success, dismissal and reinvention collided.

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Doug Liversidge CBE grew up on a Sheffield council estate, left school at 15, and was told he wasn’t good enough for the company’s graduate programme.

It could have been the end of the story.

Instead, it became the beginning.

In this first episode of The Digital Forge, Doug reflects on growing up in post-war Sheffield, the teacher who changed his life, his early years at English Steel, winning a scholarship to the University of Sheffield, and the National Service that transformed a shy teenager into a confident leader.

Along the way he shares remarkable stories of navigating the Libyan desert with nothing more than a compass and a watch, returning to Sheffield to build a career in Britain’s steel industry, and the lessons that shaped one of the city’s most influential industrial leaders.

The episode closes with an unforgettable first meeting in 1979 with a young production engineer called Pam, a woman Doug initially believed wasn’t right for his team.

He couldn’t have been more wrong.

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Richard Stubbs believes Britain has been looking at health the wrong way.

Not as an economic engine. Not as productivity infrastructure. Not as one of the great determinants of national prosperity. Too often, we treat the NHS as a cost to be managed rather than a platform for growth, prevention and human potential.

In Part Two of this conversation with David Richards MBE, Richard argues that poor health is now one of Britain’s biggest economic problems. He explains why prevention, workplace wellbeing, AI, data and regional innovation could unlock enormous productivity gains, keep more people in work and help rebuild communities too often left behind.

The conversation moves from the NHS to the workplace, from mental health to musculoskeletal disease, from Yorkshire’s life sciences strengths to the failure of Britain to commercialise its own research.

Richard also speaks candidly about race, leadership and institutional power. He explains why diversity in healthcare innovation is not a slogan, but a matter of life and death, including the shocking example of pulse oximeters that did not work properly on darker skin.

This is a conversation about the future of the NHS, but also about something bigger: whether Britain can build a healthier, fairer and more productive country.

You can also meet speakers like Richard Stubbs live at The Digital Forge, where founders, investors, policymakers and industry leaders come together to explore the future of technology, innovation and regional growth.

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