Building on manufacturing strengths

A couple of recent newspaper stories on manufacturing caught my attention regarding what may be the future of manufacturing in the US. There is this story in the New York Times (Detroit Auto-Parts Suppliers Branch Out to Other Industries) which explains:

In September, for instance, NTR, a solar energy company from Ireland, awarded contracts to two Detroit-area auto suppliers, including the race-car engine developer McLaren Performance Technologies, to make components for thousands of SunCatcher solar dishes.
"It should be no surprise we went to Detroit," says Jim Barry, NTR's chief executive. "The standard of manufacturing in the automotive industry is extraordinarily high, and that is the only place you can find such a concentration of skills."

And there a story in the Wall Street Journal (Radical Shifts Take Hold in U.S. Manufacturing) about how capital investment in industries has shifted. One part of that article was especially telling:

A large chunk of semiconductor production takes place abroad, but many companies still prefer to produce in the U.S., particularly if their manufacturing entails little human labor or is highly complex. Being close to the U.S.-based design centers of major chip users like computer maker Dell Inc. and consumer-electronics maker Apple Inc. also can be an advantage.
"This is a kind of manufacturing that will make sense to do in the U.S. for a long time to come," said Tim Peddecord, chief executive of privately held memory-module producer Avant Technology, which recently opened a new 50,000-square-foot plant in Pflugerville, Texas. The new plant will boost the company's capacity to 800,000 modules a month from 500,000.

Both stories illustrate that the key is building on the existing strengths of the industries intangible assets -- in these cases, the worker skills and the relationship with customers/suppliers. As I've noted before, we need to explicitly incorporate intangibles and intellectual capital into our manufacturing strategy. - - - By the way, the New America Foundation talking points on manufacturing outline why it is important to the US economy -- including for maintaining our innovative capacity. Worth the read.