Best of British: engine of industry Simon Eccles
Industrial Inkjet is a UK manufacturer with strong Japanese connections and an obsession with testing.
At first glance you might not think that Industrial Inkjet qualifies for our Best of British series. It sells print applications for Konica Minolta’s range of inkjet printheads, made in Japan. Yet it is an all-British owned company, based near Cambridge and trading worldwide with a turnover of £8.9m in 2020.
The origins of the company, which usually goes by the initials IIJ, were rather Japanese in style though. In 2005 John Corrall was already well established in the inkjet business, having about 20 years’ experience with the UK-based companies Domino, Elmjet, Videojet, Xaar and Xennia. “I was always in an R&D or engineering role, though sometimes also service and manufacturing,” he says. “When I was at Xennia, Konica Minolta sent me their first printhead evaluation kit to try and I wrote a short r