Innovation always on the boil at STRIX, the award-winning Isle of Man manufacturer.

A STRIX control is used over a billion times a day around the world. That's some statistic. Another hot fact is that STRIX products are used by about 20% of the world's population, which might explain why the company has just won its third Queen's Award for Exports.

STRIX - the company name is the Latin word for a screech owl - was founded by John Taylor in 1981. Now with 350 employees at its original Isle of Man manufacturing site, STRIX has manufacturing plants in Chester, Malmesbury and China as well as sales offices in Brussels, Hong Kong and Moscow - over 1,000 employees in all.

Turnover is over the £70 million mark, profitability is very healthy, and annual growth runs in double figures "somewhere between 10% and 20% depending on the vagaries of life," according to the executive chairman, Eddie Davies OBE.

And now there has been this third Queen's Award. Fourth, in fact, since amongst the export awards was the Queen's Award for Innovation in 2000. The first export award came in 1995, the second in 1998.

The citation for the 2002 award (now called the Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade) stated that STRIX had increased its overseas earnings by almost 50% in the previous three years, exported well over £100 million worth of product to more than 40 countries worldwide. STRIX's main market is China, not so much to consumers but to manufacturers who use STRIX's controls in their product and re-export them. The biggest consumer markets, are probably Germany and Russia.

Creating all the heat under this Manx-based operation is STRIX's product range of controls for kettles, jugs and other water boiling appliances such as coffee makers. John Taylor started the company to make and market his invention of a kettle control with an automatic steam switch-off - the blessed saviour not only of squillions of kettles but of square miles of kitchen wallpaper spared from forgotten kettles steaming till they boil dry.

Today STRIX is the world market leader (with a staggering 70% world market share) in kettle design technology using thermostatic controls. Other quantum leap innovations in STRIX's career have been the control for the cordless kettle, and the thermal fuse - which allowed kettle and jug manufacturers to switch to plastic rather than metal.

Davies explains: "With the old shiny metal kettle, if the automatic switch-off didn't work, the water would boil off and disappear, and a second control would kick in. If that also failed, the heating element would go bang, and that would be that. But if the kettle were made of plastic and both controls failed, the plastic would burn, and there'd be a serious risk of fire."

"The thermal fuse stops that risk, and allowed manufacturers to move first to white plastic and then to the huge variety of colours and translucent plastics on the market today."

A move on from the original cordless kettle has been made possible by STRIX's 360° cordless control (which allows user to plonk the kettle down any old way on its base rather than slotting it in carefully).

STRIX has also taken the heating element out of the water and hidden it from the user - not only does it look better, but it makes the kettle easier to clean. "The German housewife likes to take a Brillo pad to the inside of her jug," says Davies. "British kettle users might be used to the sight of limescale, but it's not so well tolerated elsewhere in the world."

Domestic habits are a key factor in STRIX's design parameters. "Whatever form of abuse you can dream up for a kettle, someone somewhere will be doing worse," laughs Davies. Boiling socks in the kettle, for instance.

"We had a jug back from one customer which had failed, and when we looked inside, there was a pair of socks at the bottom." Davies is amused by the idiosyncrasies of his 1.2 billion customers.

One might think, living in Britain, that a kettle would be an essential part of everyday life, but not so. Kettles were virtually unheard of in Germany ten years ago - they were a nation of coffee drinkers and relied on their percolators. Only now are they being turned on to the delights of tea. The same applies to southern Europe and North America - coffee drinkers all. Not only is tea slowly making itself drunk around the world, but STRIX is applying its designs to coffee-making appliances.

Russians have been drinking tea for centuries, but they boil water in a samovar - so STRIX now makes controls for samovars; but the Russian market is also slowly converting to jugs and kettles. The same goes for Turkey.

In South East Asia the problem is different - there filling the kettle from the tap does not give the consumer drinkable water, so STRIX has come up with a solution that includes filtration, amongst other things.

And quite apart from the evolution of STRIX's technology, the world population continues to grow at about 2% per year; in 1984 there were 5.5 billion folk on the planet - today there are over 6 billion. Not only that, but the population is living longer, has an increasing disposable income, and improving infrastructure on tap. So even if STRIX never came up with a new idea, there is a never-ending supply of brand new consumers to sell a kettle to.

Continuous improvement, however, is part of the STRIX culture. The company spends about 5% of its turnover on research and development - higher than average - and STRIX engineers work with customers' own design teams from early stages on issues such as cosmetic cover design and its effect on steam control reset times, or steam ducting design and response times.

The high reliance on engineering excellence was one of the reasons STRIX set up on the Isle of Man. Founder John Taylor happened to be living there at the time, but there was a good pool of engineers on the island because of the TT racing industry; there was also a pool of available labour and enthusiastic support from the Isle of Man government. And the tax advantages presumably. "The tax situation was a bonus," says Davies, "but no manufacturer would choose a location purely because of a benign tax regime - there were more obvious advantages to being on Man than that."

Eddie Davies has enjoyed one of the more obvious advantages of the Isle of Man - the sheer pleasure of living on one of the more beautiful islands off Britain's coast - since 1984 when he came to join John Taylor as a managing director.

With a first class maths degree from Durham, Davies trained as a mechanical engineer and a management accountant, and was assistant group MD for the Scapa Group in Blackburn, with a turnover of £300 million. Approached by headhunters, Davies took the job with STRIX. "From a company the size of Scapa to one with a turnover of £1 million and 100 staff may not have seemed an obvious career move," admits Davies. "But John Taylor impressed me enormously, and I could see the potential for the product. A world market with 100 million new consumers a year, all of whom need to boil water to survive, a new concept and no competition - that seemed like a meaty challenge."

And so it proved. STRIX flourished, and continues to grow at attractive rates. Davies sees organic growth as the preferred route: "Acquisitions are opportunistic - we have made a few but it is not the ideal route to growth for us, I prefer to stick to our knitting."

Davies' knitting, however, is not just making and flogging product. To win a Queen's Award a company cannot just be good at what it does, but how it does it. Corporate responsibility to the wider community, to the environment, to the workforce - all aspects of company thinking and practice are examined by the QA judging panel before awards are made.

Such stringent criteria mean that having one Queen's Award - let alone four - stands STRIX in very good stead in world markets. "There are no equivalent awards outside the UK, and having a Queen's Award is seen as a recognition of our standing as an excellent company and puts clear water between us and our competitors," says Davies.

One would think that a company with 70% market share would have an fair-sized stretch of clear water before any competitors hove into view anyway, but no doubt the Queen's Award makes STRIX that much more buoyant.