Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
June 29, 2006
Innovation Needed to Keep USA Manufacturing?

ICAR touted as example of innovation needed in U.S.

“Our ace in the hole is innovation, and that’s why intellectual property is so important to develop,” Graham said. “How do we protect that advantage within the rule of the law?”

Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton are co-chairs of the United States Senate Manufacturing Caucus. Is innovation our ace in the hole? I don’t think so.

There is no ace in the hole. If countries want to keep manufacturing jobs they are going to have to do lots of things right. No country has such an advantage they can expect to rely on their country being more innovative (of offering cheaper labor or their citizens working harder or…) than all the other countries in the world.

Innovation has been an advatage for the USA. It should continue to be an advantage for the USA but many other countries will innovate very well (Japan, Germany, China, Korea, Singapore, England…). The USA has many assets: transportation infrastructure, banking, rule of law, educated and skilled workforce, huge market, decent tax laws, engineering education… The key will be to keep focusing on the whole system (and fix things like huge budget deficient, huge current account deficit, excessive health care costs, excessive executive pay…).

I also believe a key competitive advantage will be in applying management improvement concepts such as lean manufacturing. Companies that don’t use management improvement ideas will find it more and more difficult to compete with companies like Toyota.

One Response to “Innovation Needed to Keep USA Manufacturing?”

  1. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Blog Archive » Quality and Innovation Says:

    [...] Innovation as manufacturing savior (innovation is important but so are many other factors) [...]

Leave a Reply



Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Categories


Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Kate: Congratulations to Mr. Convis. Dana will undoubtably become more competitive with his expertise.
  • Jurgen Appelo: I believe Milton Friedman, possibly the greatest economist of the 20th century, when he said that the...
  • Anonymous: Very good presentation. It will help building new web based application faster
  • Thomas: buahaha, I want cat like this one ;)
  • Ron Pereira: Great work, John. I look forward to your next 1000 posts (and beyond). All the best.
  • clarke ching: Wonderful!
  • Mike Wroblewski: Hi John, Good post that highlights an excellent PBS show. I just happened to watch it this week with...
  • Tom: John: Here’s the link to my Kiva page: http://www.kiva.org/lender/tom 2469 I think I got started after...

Archives

June 2006
M T W T F S S
« May   Jul »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930