As part of his administration’s strategy to rejuvenate American manufacturing, President Obama has called for the creation of a National Network of Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) to advance and diffuse novel manufacturing technologies. To launch it, he has allocated $1 billion in the 2013 budget.
Critics have denounced this proposal as yet another government intrusion into the market and a futile attempt to “pick winners.” What these critics ignore is that the US government has a long history of investing in research that supports innovation in American industry.
After World War II, hundreds of billions of federal dollars flowed through agencies like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and NASA to pay for the basic and applied research that spawned the semiconductor, computer, software, aerospace, and telecommunications industries. Research funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sowed the seeds for the internet and advanced computer graphics. And massive investments by the National Institutes of Health in biomedical research, including the Human Genome Project, helped make the United States the hotspot for biomedical innovation. The lessons from our history are clear: Where we invest in science, we gain enormous economic pay-offs.
In principle, therefore, there is no reason why the same logic should not apply to manufacturing. Just as the National Institutes of Health have pushed forward the frontiers of medical science, so should the NNMI be capable of doing the same for manufacturing. There are many areas of science that underpin advanced manufacturing, including biotechnology, nanotechnology, advanced materials, computer science, optics, and various engineering disciplines. We need to get over the outdated notion that manufacturing is “mature” and unconnected to science. Anyone who believes that should take a tour of a factory that produces semiconductors or biotechnology drugs. In an ever more competitive global economy, US manufacturing can thrive only if it is at the leading edge of knowledge.
History provides some guidelines for making sure the NNMI lives up to its potential: • Have a broad agenda: Government-funded research is most productive when it lays broad foundations rather than targets specific technologies for use in particular industries. Consider the difference between the government’s successful effort to map the human genome and its failed attempt to subsidize “green energy” companies like Solyndra. The former paved the way for an enormous range of subsequent commercial R&D efforts by pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics, and agricultural companies. The latter was a very specific commercial bet. Placing these commercial bets requires a depth of understanding of markets and customers that only the private sector possesses.
