Tag Archives: manufacturing

Increasing manufacturing jobs in the U.S. requires innovation and variety — Donald Rosenfield

MIT Sloan Sr. Lecturer Don Rosenfield

In the last 10 years, there has been a dramatic reduction in manufacturing jobs in the U.S. due to a combination of factors, such as the economic crisis and foreign competition. But manufacturing jobs can return to the U.S., and a key component of that return involves innovation to facilitate product variety.

Companies that manufacture products abroad typically do not offer significant product variety, as the support costs — like inventory, markdowns and returns — are too high. It’s more economical to produce a narrow product line when you’re shipping to warehouses from across an ocean. Read More »

A systems engineering view of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner–Steve Eppinger

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is a huge innovation. The first new aircraft launched in more than a decade, Boeing uses incredibly advanced manufacturing technology to build a lighter-weight carbon composite plane for improved fuel-efficiency. In addition, the planes include a number of state-of-the-art design features to increase passenger comfort on long-haul flights. Read More »

Andrew McAfee: Are droids taking our jobs?

Robots and algorithms are getting good at jobs like building cars, writing articles, translating — jobs that once required a human. So what will we humans do for work? Andrew McAfee walks through recent labor data to say: We ain’t seen nothing yet. But then he steps back to look at big history, and comes up with a surprising and even thrilling view of what comes next. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)

Andrew McAfee is Associate Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business and co-author of  “Race Against the Machine”

Tom Kochan: The Workforce

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan
Photograph by Stu Rosner

From Harvard Magazine

An interview with Thomas A. Kochan, Bunker professor of management, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and co-director of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.

Harvard Magazine: You speak of a fundamental human-capital paradox in the way American employers and workers interact with each other.

Thomas Kochan: American corporations often say human resources are their most important asset. In our national discourse, everyone talks about jobs. Yet as a society we somehow tolerate persistent high unemployment, 30 years of stagnating wages and growing wage inequality, two decades of declining job satisfaction and loss of pension and retirement benefits, and continuous challenges from the consequences of unemployment on family life. If we really valued work and human resources, we would address these problems with the vigor required to solve them. Read More »

Asst. Prof. Karen Zheng: When a handshake is enough–the role of trust in supply chain management

MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Karen Zheng

Trust is important to our relationships with friends, family, and acquaintances. Less understood, though, is the role trust can play in business relationships. When businesses deal with each other, their first impulse often is to summon their lawyers. But I have found in my research that there are many situations in which trust can be an effective replacement for costly and time-consuming contract negotiations.

To understand the role of trust in business, I and two colleagues, Ozalp Ozer of the University of Texas at Dallas and Kay-Yut Chen of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, conducted a series of computer laboratory experiments that simulated one of the most vexing problems in supply chain management: The tendency for manufacturers to issue overly optimistic forecasts.

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