A manufacturing renaissance for America?

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At an MIT forum, experts examine new ways to pursue a good old idea: making things.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office
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Christine Ortiz, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, discusses “bio-inspired” synthetic materials at an MIT forum, “The Future of Manufacturing Innovation — Advanced Technologies," held on Monday.
Photo: Patrick Gillooly
March 31, 2010

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Over the last few decades, the sector of the U.S. economy devoted to manufacturing has lost ground to the services sector. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs has declined from nearly 20 million in 1979 to about 12 million today. Yet as the recent global recession suggests, services can propel the economy only so far. There is no substitute for making tangible, useful products.

But what form will new kinds of manufacturing take? At an MIT roundtable discussion on Monday titled “The Future of Manufacturing — Advanced Technologies,” more than a dozen of the Institute’s faculty shared converging ideas about how to reinvigorate America’s goods-producing businesses. The roundtable followed a broader campus forum hosted by MIT President Susan Hockfield on March 1, in which faculty members, some of whom also participated in Monday’s discussion, offered ideas about how to strengthen America innovation and thus its overall economy. These meetings are part of a larger effort by MIT to contribute the Institute’s expertise in emerging technologies and innovation policies to the national effort to revitalize the American economy.

Monday’s discussion cast specific issues of manufacturing in the light of broad economic considerations. “To recover from the current economic downturn, it has been estimated that we need to create on the order of 17 million to 20 million new jobs in the coming decade,” noted Hockfield in her opening remarks at the event, which was co-sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness, an industry group. “And it’s very hard to imagine where those jobs are going to come from unless we seriously get busy reinventing manufacturing.” That question should be of great concern to scientists and engineers — 64 percent of whom, Hockfield noted, are employed in the manufacturing sector.

Hockfield also directly addressed the commonly held notion that the United States cannot compete in manufacturing against low-wage countries, citing the success of Japan and Germany, both of which feature trade surpluses and high wages. “I take this as positive proof that building a strong advanced manufacturing sector is not impossible, but very much worth pursuing,” Hockfield said. In addition to new business practices and continued strength in education, Hockfield added, “A key hope for progress lies in tapping unprecedented new manufacturing technologies.”

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/future-manufacture-0331.html