Manufacturing’s New Innovation Labs

The Harvard Business Review notes that in what now seems a distant past, company research facilities like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs fueled innovation and growth for dominant American manufacturing firms. As the pace of technological change has quickened and the costs of R&D have grown, that model has ceased to work. Meanwhile, global competition has intensified the imperative to innovate. Although many companies still maintain proprietary research operations, they’re increasingly turning outward and depending on distributed or open research, in which firms or clusters of firms tap into larger networks of academic and applied work to drive new product and process development.

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