Innovation and Product Development in the 21st Century

摘要

This paper lays out the complex realities of the manufacturing industry, identifies responses of successful firms to the dynamic technological and economic changes in front of them, and suggests opportunities for action that can be taken to help leading manufacturers retain their global competitiveness while helping all manufacturers navigate the difficult terrain before them. On behalf of the MEP Advisory Board I want to stress the need to move forward with a manufacturing policy. While some will argue that we should not have a formal industrial policy, we believe we already have one. What has evolved as our policy is a disjointed set of interventions related to taxation, trade, health care, tort reform, energy, regulation of the financial sector, and the by-product of a near-heroic effort to restructure the domestic automobile assembly industry. The law of unintended consequences is our de facto policy. The U.S. has a choice: do nothing and continue as is, or establish a set of policies that help leading American manufacturing firms make the transition to product innovation, development, and deployment in new sales and new markets.