We Are Paying the Price for Outsourcing Manufacturing
Decades ago we began to outsource our manufacturing of consumer goods to countries such as Japan, Korea, and China. After all, manufacturing was industrial age stuff, very low value in America’s high tech, information economy. Turns out we were wrong. And we are now paying the price in a diminished capability to innovate. The link between manufacturing and innovation is not well understood, argues Harvard Business School professor Gary Pisano, who coauthored Restoring America’s Competitiveness in the current Harvard Business Review. “Manufacturing and R&D are much harder to separate than we commonly suppose,” Pisano says in this HBR podcast. “Very often there is a lot of innovation that has to happen in the manufacturing process.” In other words we learn…
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