Erica R.H. Fuchs

Design for Location? The Impact of Manufacturing Offshore on Technology Competitiveness in the Optoelectronics Industry

This paper presents a case study of the impact of manufacturing offshore on technology competitiveness in the optoelectronics industry. It examines a critical design/facility location decision being faced by optoelectronic component manufacturers. This paper uses a combination of simulation modeling and empirical data to demonstrate the economic constraints facing these firms. The results show that production location changes the relative production economics of the two competing designs---one emerging, one prevailing---that are currently perfect substitutes for each other on the telecom market, but not necessarily perfect substitutes in other markets in the long term. Specifically, if optoelectronic component firms shift production from the United States to countries in developing East Asia, the emerging designs that were developed in the United States no longer pay. Production characteristics are different abroad, and the prevailing design can be more cost effective in developing country production environments. The emerging designs, however, have performance characteristics that may be valuable in the long term to the larger computing market and to pushing forward Moores law. This paper concludes by exploring the dilemma this creates for the optoelectronic component manufacturers and recommending a framework based on which the results may be generalized to other industries.

PERSPECTIVE---Collective Intelligence in the Organization of Science

Whereas some suggest that consensus is the desirable end goal in fields of science, this paper suggests that the existing literature on collective intelligence offers key alternative insights into the evolution of knowledge in scientific communities. Drawing on the papers in this special issue, we find that the papers fall across a spectrum of convergent, divergent, and reflective activities. In addition, we find there to be a set of ongoing theoretical tensions common across the papers. We suggest that this diversity of activities and ongoing theoretical tensions---both signs of collective intelligence---may be a far more appropriate measure than consensus of the health of a scientific community.

Global manufacturing and the future of technology

Where you manufacture changes what you get The global locus of manufacturing has been changing dramatically over the last three decades, driven by industrializing nations, most prominently China. Classical economics suggests that global productivity gains achieved by shifting the location of manufacturing will outweigh the losses (1). But shifts in the global locus of manufacturing may affect not just production costs, but the nature and pace of technological change.

THE FUTURE OF THE ASIAN AUTO INDUSTRY: REGIONAL INTEGRATION, ALTERNATIVE DESIGNS, AND CHINESE LEADERSHIP.

This paper provides a critical analysis of the key drivers behind the future of the automotive industry in Asia. It argues that three changes will condition the evolution of the Asian auto sector. First, the Asian region will rapidly progress towards an integrated market and, as a whole, will play a central role in the global automotive industry. Second, alternative vehicle designs specific to the emerging Asian markets can be expected to emerge and form a second tier market. Political and economic advantages exist for the bodies of these vehicles being of fiber-composite resin materials instead of the steel of traditional vehicles. Finally, China will increasingly play a leadership role in the region, driving the regional economic integration process and establishing itself as critical base and destination for automakers and suppliers. The paper also addresses the evolving regional division of labor in Asia and how differences across countries, automakers, and suppliers may play a role in the emerging context.

Policy needed for additive manufacturing

The successful adoption of metallic additive manufacturing in aviation will require investment in basic scientific understanding of the process, defining of standards and adaptive regulation.

Learning by Doing in Multiproduct Manufacturing: Variety, Customizations, and Overlapping Product Generations

Extending research on organizational learning to multiproduct environments is of particular importance given that the vast majority of products are manufactured in such environments. We investigate learning in a multiproduct facility drawing on exceptionally rich data for a manufacturing firm that is a leading producer of high-technology hardware components. Weekly data for 10 years from the firm’s production and human resource tracking systems are augmented by surveys of managers and engineers and by extensive firsthand observation. We find that productivity improves when multiple generations of the firm’s primary product family are produced concurrently, reflecting the firm’s ability to augment and transfer knowledge from older to newer product generations. No significant transfer of knowledge is evident between the primary product family and other products. Productivity is, however, adversely affected when the production facility is faced with extensive within-product buyer-specific customizations. We ...

Metal Additive Manufacturing: Cost Competitive Beyond Low Volumes

Additive manufacturing is increasingly of interest for commercial and military applications due to its potential to create novel geometries with increased performance. For additive manufacturing to find commercial application, it must be cost competitive against traditional processes such as forging. Forecasting the production costs of future products prior to large-scale investment is challenging due to the limits of traditional cost accounting’s ability to handle both the systemic process implications of new technologies and cognitive biases in humans’ additive and systemic estimates. Leveraging a method uniquely suited to these challenges, we quantify the production and use economics of an additively-manufactured versus a traditionally forged GE engine bracket of equivalent performance for commercial aviation. Our results show that, despite the simplicity of the engine bracket, when taking into account part redesign for AM and the associated lifetime fuel savings of the additively-designed bracket, the additively manufactured part and design is cheaper than the forged one for a wide range of scenarios, including at higher volumes of 2,000 to 12,000 brackets per year. Opportunities to further reduce costs include accessing lower material prices without compromising quality, producing vertical builds with equivalent performance to horizontal builds, and increasing process control so as to enable reduced testing. Given the conservative nature of our assumptions as well as our choice of part, these results suggest there may be broader economic viability for additively manufactured parts, especially when systemic factors and use costs are incorporated.

Hierarchical Linkage Clustering with Distributions of Distances for Large-Scale Record Linkage

Distance-based clustering techniques such as hierarchical clustering use a single estimate of distance for each pair of observations; their results then rely on the accuracy of this estimate. However, in many applications, datasets include measurement error or are too large for traditional models, meaning a single estimate of distance between two observations may be subject to error or computationally prohibitive to calculate. For example, in many of today’s large-scale record linkage problems, datasets are prohibitively large, making distance estimates computationally infeasible. By using a distribution of distance estimates instead (e.g. from an ensemble of classifiers trained on subsets of recordpairs), these issues may be resolved. We present a large-scale record linkage framework that incorporates classifier ensembles and “distribution linkage” clustering to identify clusters of records corresponding to unique entities. We examine the performance of several different distributional summary measures in hierarchical clustering. We motivate and illustrate this approach with an application of record linkage to the United States Patent and Trademark Office database.

Innovating Up, Down, and Sideways: The (Unlikely) Institutional Origins of Experimentation in China's Plug-in Electric Vehicle Industry

Scholars have previously disagreed on the types of innovation occurring with firms in China. Some suggest firms predominantly conduct process innovations in mass manufacturing, others point to an emerging and more complex form of product-process co-development that often occurs further downstream in technology commercialization and redefinition. Our findings suggest that the innovation environment in China may be richer and more diverse than these previous scholars have suggested. We observe firms innovating in three distinct directions (“up”, “down”, and “sideways”) with respect to vehicle technology and organizational and business strategies in the plug-in vehicle sector. Using sales data, archival data, and 37 qualitative interviews with automotive managers and engineers, government officials, researchers, journalists, and industry consultants, we apply inductive, grounded theory building techniques to help explain the diversity of observed innovations. Our findings suggest that while national institutions such as the joint venture system may be inadvertently discouraging innovation and diffusion of electric vehicle technologies in both the foreign and domestic arms of joint venture firms, regional institutions such as local protectionism may be serving as incubators for a variety of innovations within independent domestic firms in their early development stages. In addition, the size and heterogeneity of China’s domestic market may be large enough to enable demand for the large variety of innovations. As these domestic firms begin to grow beyond their protected regional markets, China’s institutions may need to evolve to support national standardization of policies and plug-in infrastructure.

Scaling Moore’s Wall: A Public-Private Partnership in Search of a Technological Revolution

The decline of corporate research and vertical disintegration of supply chains in many industries has led to an innovation ecosystem increasingly reliant on linkages between institutions. These shifts present new challenges for long-term technology development. Pre-commercial public-private research consortia offer one policy response, and yet the majority of past research has focused on public-private consortia created for short-term (1- to 3-years out) technology development and technology catch-up. Based on unprecedented access to archives of the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), publically available data, 50 semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, we examine how one public-private partnership, the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI), emerged in response to arguably the most significant presumptive anomaly of our time: the end of Moore’s Law. NRI aimed to bridge the semiconductor industry’s past 40 years of unprecedented technology development — captured by Moore’s Law — with a radically new (and, as of this writing, not-yet-discovered) technology that will maintain this development indefinitely. We describe and analyze the processes by which NRI emerged. Building on a long history of collaborative university-industry research programs managed by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), we suggest the NRI played a coordinating role within the scientific community. Specifically, we show how NRI incorporated industry expertise in manufacturing and design to inform and shape academic research aimed at inventing a successor to CMOS technology. We conclude by questioning the extent to which the effort was appropriately suited to the nature and importance of the end-of-Moore’s Law challenge and the extent to which lessons from NRI may be generalized to a broader set of industrial contexts requiring coordination to overcome major technological discontinuities. Given that the NRI program was ongoing as of the terminal date of our study, we make no normative judgment about NRI’s success or failure in meeting its objectives.