Driving American Innovation

Driving American innovation: creating jobs and boosting our economy : hearing before the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, March 9, 2011.

Driving American innovation: creating jobs and boosting our economy: hearing before the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, March 9, 2011.

Business managers know that cost-cutting measures cannot create long-term growth--greater revenues require sustained innovation. In this book, Tucker provides a practical step-by-step method any business can use to identify opportunities and encourage innovations that capitalize on them.

How to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector by encouraging advanced manufacturing, bringing innovative technologies into the production process. The United States lost almost one-third of its manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. As higher-paying manufacturing jobs are replaced by lower-paying service jobs, income inequality has been approaching third world levels. In particular, between 1990 and 2013, the median income of men without high school diplomas fell by an astonishing 20% between 1990 and 2013, and that of men with high school diplomas or some college fell by a painful 13%. Innovation has been left largely to software and IT startups, and increasingly U.S. firms operate on a system of “innovate here/produce there,” leaving the manufacturing sector behind. In this book, William Bonvillian and Peter Singer explore how to rethink innovation and revitalize America's declining manufacturing sector. They argue that advanced manufacturing, which employs such innovative technologies as 3-D printing, advanced material, photonics, and robotics in the production process, is the key. Bonvillian and Singer discuss transformative new production paradigms that could drive up efficiency and drive down costs, describe the new processes and business models that must accompany them, and explore alternative funding methods for startups that must manufacture. They examine the varied attitudes of mainstream economics toward manufacturing, the post-Great Recession policy focus on advanced manufacturing, and lessons from the new advanced manufacturing institutes. They consider the problem of “startup scaleup,” possible new models for training workers, and the role of manufacturing in addressing “secular stagnation” in innovation, growth, the middle classes, productivity rates, and related investment. As recent political turmoil shows, the stakes could not be higher.

Conventional business wisdom tells us that entrepreneurs are society’s main source of innovation. Young founders leave college with a big idea, get to work in a garage, and build something that changes the world. Typical corporate employees, strangled by slow-moving bureaucracy, are blocked from making transformative discoveries. In Driving Innovation from Within, strategist and advisor Kaihan Krippendorff disproves one of today’s biggest business myths to highlight lessons for innovators and leaders. He reveals how many of the modern world’s most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee innovators. If it were left up to go-it-alone entrepreneurs, we would not have mobile phones, personal computers, or e-mail. Distilling more than 150 interviews with internal innovators and leading experts along with insights from the latest research and today’s most successful companies, from Tencent and Amazon to Mastercard and Starbucks, Krippendorff lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside. He maps the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and provides tools to remove them, detailing how visionary leaders can create islands of freedom inside an organization to activate existing employees’ potential and beat startups at their own game. Driving Innovation from Within is a practical and inspiring guide to leadership from all levels for those who want the fulfillment of changing the world without leaving their job in order to do it.

Pres. Obama’s Innovation Strategy builds on over $100 billion of Recovery Act funds that support innovation, support for educ., infrastructure and others and novel regulatory and exec. order initiatives. It seeks to harness the ingenuity of the Amer. people and a dynamic private sector to ensure that the next expansion is more solid, broad-based, and beneficial than previous ones. The strategy focuses on critical areas where balanced gov’t. policies can lay the foundation for innovation that leads to quality jobs and shared prosperity: (1) Invest in the Building Blocks of Amer. Innovation; (2) Promote Competitive Markets that Spur Productive Entrepreneurship; (3) Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities. Illus. This is a print on demand publication.