Making Value: Integrating Manufacturing, Design and Innovation to Thrive in the Changing Global Economy 

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) recently released a workshop summary on Making Value: Integrating Manufacturing, Design, and Innovation to Thrive in the Changing Global Economy.   This report describes the opportunities that lie ahead at the intersection of innovation, design, and manufacturing while developing a new framework that can be used to turn the national dialog about “manufacturing” in a more productive and positive direction.  The report also looks at the critical changes in education, business, and government that the advisory committee deemed necessary to take advantage of these opportunities.

The NAE Committee on Manufacturing, Design and Innovation (MDI) consists of approximately a dozen experts from industry, academia and government, appointed by Charles Vest, NAE President.  NCMS Senior Vice President, Rebecca Taylor, was one of the advisors on the repot. 

The committee advised the NAE regarding the planning and development of the program on MDI and worked on significant national issues posed by trends in MDI while helping to frame questions that the National Academies could more broadly investigate.  In addition, the experts recommended topics for workshops, symposia and studies and provided feedback on Academy proposals around MDI.

The committee recommends that NAE develop a fast-track study looking at three areas: 

1. Making value through holistic best practices: Develop a teachable system of best practices for making value by synthesizing exemplary case studies;

2. Establishing the ecosystem for future work: Describe future scenarios for the MDI ecosystem, how people work in this ecosystem, and the skills, education, infrastructure, and government policies that are needed to support this work; and

3. Making the US the ideal place to make value: Explain the necessary and sufficient conditions to make the US the ideal place to make value and provide recommendations to achieve this ideal.

The next steps are for the NAE to implement the recommendations and move toward a national discussion of manufacturing, design and innovation.    A copy of the report is available at: http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13504