As I mentioned in my previous post, the January/February issue of Technology Review has a fascinating profile of Prof Suzanne Berger (it appears in the MIT section of the magazine and I am not sure if non-alumni can read it in the print version of the magazine, but it is available in its entirety online.) It has the intriguing headline: “In more than four decades at MIT, political scientist Suzanne Berger has shifted from studying French peasants to spearheading research on how to revive US industry.”
Here is a summary of the article (please do read the whole piece on Technology Review's website):
- “In Berger’s view, although laboratory research continues to thrive in the United States, too often it remains untapped commercially.” She also “disagrees strongly with those who insist that US manufacturing is in a state of irreversible decline.”
- Berger is “co-chair of a new MIT initiative on manufacturing, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE)”, which investigates questions such as: “What is the best ways to move innovations from the lab to the shop floor? And how can manufacturing firms grow from tiny startups to large-scale enterprises?”
- I also enjoyed reading the story of how Berger came to study peasants in France’s Brittany for her doctoral thesis. She joined MIT in 1968 and was asked to serve on the Commission on Industrial Productivity in 1986, which interviewed companies, analyzed data and made recommendations. This led to the book Made in America, co-authored by the commission chairmen.
- The article discusses the phenomenon of creative destruction/recomposition.
- Berger is the lead author of the 2006 book How we compete, which analyzes when companies outsource business tasks and factories and argues that “profits come from being able to do something that another company cannot easily replicate” instead of simply lowering labor costs.
- An important point Berger makes is that there is a strong connection between manufacturing and services, because companies that sell equipment also service it. It is therefore important to look at the bundle of products rather than assuming the US will become dominated by service-industry jobs.
- Berger is also opposed to the view that “the IT industry is the basic paradigm for innovation-based manufacturing in America.”
- The article ends with a short example of innovative manufacturing in the US.
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