Two of the very best articles I have read in a really long time are in the January/February issue of Technology Review. The first one is: “Can we manufacture tomorrow’s breakthroughs?” The second one, a profile of Prof Suzanne Berger entitled “Standing up for manufacturing” (part of the MIT-specific section of the magazine), will be the focus of the post I will publish on Thursday.
The article, whose title becomes “Can we build tomorrow’s breakthroughs?” once you open the magazine to the correct page, has the following subtitle: “Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That’s bad news not just for the country’s economy but for the future of innovation.” The piece is rather long but absolutely riveting – I highly recommend it. For today’s post, I’ll simply write a point-by-point summary of the article, with hopefully enough details to interest you but also make you want to read the whole thing. Again, this is one of the very best articles I have read in recent memory.
- The article starts with the example of General Electric’s new battery manufacturing facility, “one of a number of facilities around the country producing new technologies for rapidly growing markets in advanced batteries, electric vehicles and solar power.” (It is accompanied by beautiful pictures of said facility.)
- This, the author argues, “cannot counter the reality that the US manufacturing sector is in trouble” because the outsourcing of production has led many companies to lose “the expertise for the complex engineering and design tasks necessary to scale up and produce today’s most innovative new technologies.”
- A key thesis of the article is that “it’s not necessarily true that innovative technologies will simply be manufactured elsewhere if it doesn’t happen in the United States.” It cites the case of integrated photonics as an example of innovation that has not been adopted as widely as expected because of the outsourcing of production by telecom companies to countries in which photonics were not cost-effective.
- The article also gives the example of General Motors’s Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant as success story regarding electric power and lithium-ion batteries. We are also treated to the details of the manufacturing of these batteries in a nearby plant, a joint venture of Dow Chemical, TK Advanced Battery and the (French) Dassault group.
- After this description of large companies, there is also a fairly long section on the startups pioneering some of these technologies. “The strategy begins with the recognition that any new technology must promise advantages far beyond what is possible with existing products”. I enjoyed reading about the use of the periodic table “for materials that might overturn current technology”, including MIT’s Materials Project.
- As the article emphasizes, these new technologies require enormous upfront investments (in the hundreds of millions of dollars.) A recent startup that was able to successfully address this challenge is A123 Systems, which benefited from the right set of circumstances and political climate to raise nearly $1 billion in public and private investments.
- Of course, the article also touches upon the lessons learned from the bankruptcy of startups Evergreen and Solyndra, including the need for increased collaboration.
- It ends with a promising area of research for the next generation of batteries, envisioning a way to get rid of the expensive non-energy-storing ingredients to make manufacturing less capital-intensive. The researcher who came up with the idea comments: “The best way to do battery research is having started a battery company. Being close to the manufacturing, you recognize what can have an impact.”
On Thursday: the profile of MIT’s Prof Suzanne Berger, who is “spearheading research on how to revive US [manufacturing] industry.”
FYI: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html
Posted by: Fbahr | January 23, 2012 at 02:38 AM