Producing Prosperity

U.S. businesses are losing their competitive edge after years of bad outsourcing and short-term thinking. This book shows how to restore our "industrial commons" and rebuild our competitive advantage. Bolstering company competitiveness, in the U.S. and throughout the world, may be the most critical [...]
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U.S. businesses are losing their competitive edge after years of bad outsourcing and short-term thinking. This book shows how to restore our "industrial commons" and rebuild our competitive advantage. Bolstering company competitiveness, in the U.S. and throughout the world, may be the most critical issue in our economy today. Continuing volatility and joblessness have only heightened the feeling that the U.S. has lost its long-time leading edge in producing innovative goods and services, particularly in technology-intensive industries. How did this happen? And more importantly, how can we get back on track? In "Producing Prosperity", Harvard Business School professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih (authors of the award-winning Harvard Business Review article "Restoring American Competitiveness") vividly show the disastrous consequences of years of bad outsourcing decisions and underinvestment in manufacturing capability.They go on to reveal how today's undervalued manufacturing operations often hold the seeds of tomorrow's innovative new products, arguing that companies must reinvest in the collective operational capabilities that underpin new product and process development in the U.S. industrial sector. It is only by reviving this "industrial commons" that we can build both the expertise and the manufacturing muscle to produce tomorrow's hot products-from electronics and appliances to solar panels and next-generation batteries-to regain competitive advantage. This will not be easy and will require major changes across government and industry. Pisano and Shih detail how government must change the way it supports basic and applied scientific research, and promote the broad collaboration between business and academia needed to tackle society's big problems. Even more crucially, they go well beyond policy to actually provide business leaders and strategists with a concrete framework for understanding the links between manufacturing and innovation in order to make better outsourcing decisions.These decisions are the key to the sustained success of global companies, industries, and national economies. "Producing Prosperity" provides the most compelling and constructive account yet of the crucial role of manufacturing in for sustained business and economic success.