Wolf

Manufacturing and Innovation

Tom Wolf published this article on November 17, 2011 in Build your Business. No comments. | Comment

In an interview in the September/October 2011 issue of MIT’s monthly magazine, Technology Review (pp. 28-29) Intel founder and former CEO Andy Grove comments on the decline of American manufacturing.  Like most observers, he laments the fact that American manufacturing isn’t what it used to be.  Unlike most other observers, however, his lament is not simply a nostalgic yearning for the golden era of busy factories and highly paid hourly workers.  He is also concerned about the impact this decline is having on America’s ability to innovate.

His point is that while much of the innovation and fresh ideas that typically produce new products and drive national economies come from the minds of engineers and scientists working in design shops and laboratories, much of that innovation also comes from the plant floor.  There, workers are continually looking for ways to make better products more efficiently.  In many ways, the innovations these workers make are truly incremental, but over a long enough time these incremental changes can produce revolutionary improvements in the products being manufactured.  The plant floor also produces the techniques that allow “innovators to scale their ideas into products,” according to Grove.

Eventually these shop floor innovators contribute a great deal to the quality and value of a product; perhaps as much as the original designers.  In fact, as a result of plant floor innovation, many design engineers and researchers end up moving their shops and laboratories near the factories making their products.  Thus, as is happening in China with photovoltaic technology, thriving manufacturing centers can also spawn thriving design and research activity with all the social and economic benefits that accompany that kind of activity.  Conversely, as a nation loses its factories, it also loses the innovation, creativity and all the benefits that accompany those two virtuous drivers of prosperity.

The idea that the plant floor is an incubator of fresh ideas is an important one, and it lends additional support to the notion that where products are made matters.  We need the good paying jobs strong manufacturers provide, but we also need the creativity they sustain.  That’s why Wolf is proud to lend its name and design expertise to American made products from kitchen cabinets to exterior building products.  We’re not only supporting our fellow citizens who make our products, we’re also helping them support the grand American tradition of innovation.