MIT Roundtable: “The Future of Manufacturing Innovation – Advanced Technologies” March 29th from 2­5pm at MIT’s Wong Auditorium, Building E51 (held in cooperation with the Council on Competitiveness) Participants: 2:00 Introduction – Susan Hockfield, President, MIT 2:05 Framing the Discussion: The Manufacturing Problem – Prof. Suzanne Berger 2:15 The DARPA Perspective: The Pathway for Manufacturing Technology Advance – Ken Gabriel, Deputy Director, DARPA 2:30 Panel One: The Materials and Nano Transformations (8‐10 minutes for each presenter) Moderator – Prof. Angela Belcher The “Materials Genome” Project ‐ Prof. Gerbrand Cedar Lightweight Materials for Transport ‐ Prof. Charles Fine and Richard Roth, Dir. Materials Systems Laboratory, re: advanced lightweight materials for heavy equipment and transport Bio­Inspired Materials ­ Prof. Christine Ortiz – re: advanced bio‐inspired structural materials for engineering Nano manufacturing ­ Prof. Martin Culpepper – re: physics‐driven invention of tools, technology and techniques that enable practical manufacturing, manipulation and measurement at the small‐scale. 3:40 Panel Two: Technology Advances for Transforming Production (8‐10 minutes for each presenter) Moderator – Prof. Charles Cooney Robotics/AI in Manufacturing ­ Prof. Rodney Brooks Production Transformation in the Pharma­Bio Sector ­ Prof. Bernhardt Trout The Crossover between Services and Manufacturing – Prof. Sanjay Sarma – pervasive networking of RFID, IT, sensors Sustainable Manufacturing and Systems – Prof. Timothy Gutowski – 4:50: Concluding Remarks – Putting Advanced Technology Elements in Context – Could they be Part of a Manufacturing Industry Transformation – Prof. Michael Cusumano 5:00 Concluding Comments – Susan Hockfield 1 MIT Roundtable: “The Future of Manufacturing Innovation – Advanced Technologies” Introduction Opening Remarks Susan Hockfield, Ph.D. President, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Manufacturing innovation is an important subject and it is a delight to host this roundtable. This is the second such roundtable; the first addressed the innovation system overall, while this one is focused on manufacturing, particularly technology advances that could spur manufacturing efficiency and productivity. We may have the sense that nothing is made in America anymore, but manufacturing is still critical to the U.S. economy. In 2007, the manufacturing sector contributed $1.6 trillion to our GDP. Manufacturing directly employs 12 million people, and an upcoming study suggests another 30 million jobs depend on our manufacturing sector. Not only are these good jobs, but also the health of the manufacturing sector is enormously important for the nation's innovation capacity. U.S. manufacturing firms employ 64% of U.S. scientists and engineers. These scientists and engineers conduct 70% of the research and development conducted in the United States. The current challenges for U.S. manufacturing are profound. We run a $500 billion trade deficit in manufactured goods and a $50 billion deficit advanced technology goods. That is a $50 billion deficit in the sort of technologies that were invented here in the U.S. Underlying problems—such as those in our automotive sector— have also been compounded by the recent “great recession.” It has been estimated that we need to create 17‐20 million jobs in the coming decade to recover from the current downturn and meet upcoming job needs. It's very hard to imagine where those jobs are going to come from unless we seriously get busy reinventing manufacturing. No matter how brilliant our innovations, they are not going to translate into strong, durable job growth unless a substantial fraction of these new technologies really is made in America. Some might argue that this conversation is occurring too late or is pointless because the U.S. cannot compete with low wage, low cost, increasingly advanced economies like China and India. But the examples of Japan and Germany counter this argument. These countries are both high wage, high cost economies like ours, but they each run dramatic trade surpluses. They provide proof that building a strong, advanced manufacturing sector is possible and very much worth pursuing. It is not a coincidence that our manufacturing challenge in the 1980s came from Germany and Japan. Japan developed a famous manufacturing system with quality awareness built into every step of the process. They established a quality/price tradeoff. They imposed just‐in‐time inventory practices. They treated employees as a fixed cost, not a variable one. 2 At the same time Germany created a system of workforce apprenticeship programs and a strong export promotion system. The U.S. urgently needed to respond at that time and MIT faculty stepped up. They analyzed their competitors' advantages and then recommended innovations that would be appropriate in this country to ensure our success. This research produced two very influential books: Made in America1 and The Machine that Changed the World2. The challenges today are comparable to the 1980s, or perhaps worse. If our manufacturing is going to rise again, it will take an aggressive mix of answers including new processes, new business models, and—unquestionably—new education and training paradigms. But a key hope for progress lies in tapping unprecedented new manufacturing technologies, which is what this roundtable hopes to address. Four questions to ask at this roundtable are: • What are the emerging opportunities in manufacturing technologies? • Can we accelerate their entry and their success? • What can we at MIT do beyond the individual research projects? • Particularly, what changes can we recommend to government and industry to create innovation policies that are tuned to the moment? Hopefully, this roundtable will be only the beginning of a far‐reaching effort to re‐think America's manufacturing economy, playing a similar role to the landmark National Academy report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm3" and its sibling legislation, the America COMPETES Act.4 The Manufacturing Problem Suzanne Berger, Ph.D. Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science Here are some facts about manufacturing in the United States: The U.S. remains the world's largest manufacturing economy and we produce 22% of the world's manufactured goods. That share has been constant for the past 30 years and China and Japan lag far behind us. What has changed over the past 30 years is the number of Americans that are employed in manufacturing; this number has gone down. Today, manufacturing workers constitute only 10% of the U.S. workforce. This is a big problem. While the U.S. economy created millions of new jobs each year before the recession, it did not create millions of new good jobs with wages like those in manufacturing. The average wage of a manufacturing worker in 2008 was $72,000 per year. The average income of a worker in the rest of the economy 1 Dertouzos, M., Lester, R., Solow, R. and the MIT Commission, Made in America Regaining the Productive Edge, MIT Press, 1989 2 Womack, J., Jones, D., Roos, D., The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production, Harper Collins Publishers, 1991 3 National Academies of Science, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energiing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, 2007 4 The America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Act of 2007, P.L. 110‐69 3 was about $57,000 a year. A General Motors (GM) worker earned about $27 per hour including benefits, while a Walmart worker earned about $9 per hour. The decline in the number of manufacturing jobs is also a major problem for the U.S. economy because as large as our share of the world's manufactured goods is, our appetite in the U.S. for manufactured goods is far larger, and the U.S. currently has huge trade deficits. The U.S. has also failed to exploit new opportunities for exporting U.S. goods. Manufactured goods comprise only 60% of U.S. exports, and our ability to manufacture is a powerful determinant of our ability to export to the rest of the world. Finally, our ability to reinvent manufacturing in the U.S. will determine our capability to bring new technologies of enormous importance and promise to the market. I urge you to think about the widely held view that manufacturing is a sunset industry, bound to decline in numbers and contribution to the economy as productivity in manufacturing increases. This notion of manufacturing as a sector that should be allowed to sink below the horizon has three distinct possibilities: The first is that, maybe, manufacturing is a sunset industry like agriculture. In agriculture U.S. productivity is so great that Americans really couldn't eat any more food in the U.S. than its farmers already produce. Maybe Americans could eat more high‐valued food, but probably not much more overall. Is this an accurate model for thinking about the future of manufacturing? With three TVs and two cars in every American family, can the country not consume any more goods than manufacturers are already producing? This is obviously false. The U.S. imports vast quantities of manufactured goods from the rest of the world, and a cursory look at its trade deficit shows that there’s a lot of room to make more here in the U.S. A second reason one could think manufacturing is a sunset industry in the U.S. is because it involves a lot of labor, and the U.S. just can’t compete with low‐wage countries like China and India—nor would we want American workers earning Chinese wages. But, as economists always remind us, what really matters is not wages but unit labor costs. Unit labor costs are determined by the productivity of more or less qualified workers using more or less advanced capital equipment. Wages are a small part of the overall equation of cost. Prof. Berger shared one anecdote from an interview with an Italian‐owned sweater factory in Romania as part of a globalization project.