91Èȱ¬

Name: Dr Paul Hawkins

Job Title: Inventor of Hawk-Eye and the Managing Director of Hawk-Eye Innovations since its creation in 2001.

Your Job:

I manage the business and ensure the smooth running of our existing products, which are mainly used in cricket and tennis. In tennis, where we're used officially by the umpire, we do about 70 court weeks a year so every week now the Hawk-Eye system is being used somewhere.

We have a responsibility to the players, the officials and the fans to ensure our technology is always accurate and reliable. Management and the operational procedure involved takes up some of my time and continuing to be innovative and getting into new sports, or doing new things within the sports we're already involved in, takes up a large proportion of my time.

At the moment there's a lot of focus on golf, which is our new sport, and we've been doing snooker for the 91Èȱ¬ for a while now. Between those two sports it's probably where we do most of the new innovation and research and development.

The Hawk-Eye is my idea, but there's a lot of people who have added to it by writing the software and been behind it in terms of making my idea happen. I'm very much one of a team.

I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur. We've just set up a new business as well, which is a bit of a departure from Hawk-Eye, so I suppose that will seal my fate as to whether I am a true entrepreneur or whether I got lucky.

Why this job?

I had ambitions to be a professional sportsman and was a pretty reasonable cricketer. I went to Durham University, partly because of their cricket academy, but soon realised I was brighter than everybody else in the cricket team, but not as good a cricketer. I'm 34-years-old now and I'm not near to retiring. I'm sure if I'd chosen professional cricket this would be kind of the age where I'd be thinking of retiring, so as a career move I'm sure I did the right thing.

In my job there's a lot more variety as well, just in terms of the number of sports I'm involved in. I'm sure if I was given the chance to trade places with Roger Federer or Kevin Pietersen, I would take it, but probably not with a second rate tennis player or a second rate cricketer.

What skills do you need to do your job?

I learnt a lot of skills when I played a lot of sport and I think a lot of the skills that you learn in sport are very transferrable. Also there's no doubt that I've worked exceptionally hard.

Good common sense, good leadership and management skills, being innovative, working hard and believing the more you put into something the more you'll get out are the main characteristics you need for this job.

Highlights?

I think developing the tennis system which is used officially by the umpire would be Hawk-Eye's biggest achievement and also mine. And going for over eight years without having developed a competitor at all is probably a significant sign of our achievement.

We're in a relatively niche market anyway, but I think people tend to try and compete and copy people's technology if they think they can do it better. Very few people have tried, and those that have tried have substantially failed and gone by the wayside which I think is a sign of what we've achieved. But credibility takes an awfully long time to build up and just a short amount of time to lose, so we can't ever really rest on our laurels.

Lowlights?

There's been lots of lowlights. We didn't pass the ITF testing to be used officially by the umpire in tennis first time. When we initially failed that testing it was slightly controversial, that was most definitely a lowlight that stands out.

There have been plenty of times when we've been at events and things have not worked initially and we've been working through the night to get something working for whenever the sports event starts. But I've been quite lucky with the people around me. We've got a good team with quite a similar mindset so when things go wrong there's quite a 'We'll get through it together' feeling.

Advice to young people?

Go for it! You've got plenty of opportunity to go and get a normal job if things don't work out, but while you're young follow your dream, follow your ambition and understand that if you don't achieve what you wanted to, it will probably set you in good stead for something else - but you don't want to die wondering!