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America's Breakthrough Illusion
| Article
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19642 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
3,854 Words |
| Author
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Richard Florida and Martin Kenney
Richard Florida and Martin Kenney are the coauthors of a new
book, The Breakthrough Illusion: Corporate America's Failure
to Move from Innovations to Mass Production (New York: Basic
Books, 1990). Florida is associate professor of management and
public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Urban
and Public Affairs. Kenney is associate professor in the
Department of Applied Behavioral Sciences at the University of
California, Davis. They are currently working together on
their second book on Japanese transplants in the United
States, to be published this spring by Oxford University
Press. |
Wherever one looks--in semiconductors, computers, or biotechnology--the story is the same: The United States achieves a commanding lead in basic research, develops the start-up companies that pioneer cutting-edge technologies, and then somehow fails to follow through, leaving nations like Japan to mass-produce the products that the world wants. Why is the nation whose industrial output once dominated world markets so unable to follow through on its own technological breakthroughs?
The answer lies in America's "breakthrough illusion"--the naïve belief held by scientists, policy makers, business officials, and average Americans that big, new scientific and technological breakthroughs will continue to lift the American economy above and beyond its major competitors. Unfortunately, the breakthrough illusion does not conform with the current global reality. As our major competitors, especially the Japanese, are providing, what matters now is the ability to harness and implement new technology--not just to invent it--to use it effectively to improve manufacturing processes and to produce better products. The root of our problems lies in the glaring separation of R&D from production and an outmoded and increasingly uncompetitive form of corporate organization that sees workers as a necessary nuisance and thus neglects the critical product and process innovations that factory workers can provide.
How We Lost the Follow-Through
It wasn't always this way. The secret of America's growth as an industrial power lay in its ability to follow through on new technology--frequently technology that was invented by major European competitors, Britain and Germany. They may have had science and technology, but we had the world's greatest capacity to turn that technology into mass-produced products; the world's largest and most advanced factories; a huge industrial work force of immigrant labor; the scientific management system of Frederick Taylor; and the mass production assembly line of Henry Ford. We could mass-produce anything faster and better than anyone. And then we combined all this with the industrial R&D laboratory, giving us a powerful new internal source of innovation. The industrial laboratories enabled large companies to integrate innovation with their already first-class manufacturing capabilities, propelling the U.S. economy to a position of world leadership in the earlier "high technology" industries. During the first half of the twentieth century, we were especially good at transferring these innovations into products.
But
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