And that’s not to mention tracking the animals in his wife’s llama trekking business at their home on the Isle of Wight.  As an IBM master inventor, Stanford-Clark has plenty of licence to play with technology – but his work always has a real-life business aim in mind.

‘IBM separates the “R” from the “D” in R&D. Research people look five or 10 years out, the blue-sky stuff unencumbered by the harsh reality of today,’ he said.

‘But in the development labs we have an applied research role, which is about taking what we have today and seeing where it will go next. It is about the evolution of the current technology rather than the revolution to the next big thing.’

Stanford-Clark has something of a pedigree in turning research into products. He was part of a team that pioneered techniques such as internet load balancing as part a project that led to the web sites for Wimbledon and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. And for an initiative to develop an internal directory for IBM, he helped create a personalised news selection function that was a forerunner of the widely-used RSS web syndication tool.

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