I liked the President’s state of the union message for its specific listing of “things to do”. Certainly the things he mentioned could use a bit of fixing. I realize that many people in the country are against anything Obama is for, and that we don’t have the money to accomplish all of these things and reduce the national debt. And it remains to be seen whether Congress is one national group or two party groups—in other words, can they accomplish anything other than posturing on behalf of their particular constituents. But the speech was definitely an upper.
I of course also liked the attention he paid to manufacturing. But as politicians tend to do, he spoke in grand figures — new jobs, growing economy, insourcing, bolstering of the middle class, more funding for research and development, and encouraging schools to focus on useable skills and knowledge. These are all good, but I wish he would have said something about product quality — like U.S. products are going to become the best in the world.
I was pleased that Obama spoke of joint university-industry manufacturing efforts, and I hope that the government and industry will support more of them. Such efforts can produce much needed insights in design and manufacturing as well as better training for people who will do the work. But in order for them to succeed, universities must accept more applied work as academically respectable. The name of the game in highly ranked universities is research, and at present research, and even interdisciplinary research, is performed by experts in an established discipline. Disciplines in engineering and business are extremely fond of mathematics and science (both natural and social) because such intellectual activities lead to academic visibility among scholars as well as producing important additions to knowledge and funding to pay for laboratories and graduate students. Faculty members are generally hired not only because of their teaching ability, but also, and perhaps primarily, because of their likelihood of becoming a leader in their academic field.
It is certainly possible to do research on manufacturing in situations in which mathematics and science (both natural and social) can be applied. Stanford’s Graduate Business School and the Department of Management Systems and Engineering in the School of Engineering do such things. And in fact both of these Schools pay attention to design, but more at the feasibility and prototype level, than on final design and production.. In fact I wrote the Good Products Bad Products book partly because of frustration with the little attention in engineering and business schools to aspects of product quality that are difficult to approach quantitatively and logically.
Our engineering faculty members bring in large amounts of research money to support their laboratories and their students, and like those in other top engineering schools tend toward science and quantitative problem solving. And that is what causes institutions to be highly ranked, because the ranking is often done by faculty members in other schools. The Stanford engineering school, partly because of a history of success, focuses on potential breakthrough areas—nano technology, energy production, digital hardware and software, robotics, biotechnology, and so on. Such fields have huge potential payoffs and provide major intellectual challenges. But manufacturing requires familiarity with more traditional industry and has a bit of a “nuts and bolts” nature.
Manufacturing is now getting an increasing amount of attention, but it still seems to be difficult to convert into institutional academic success. I once chaired a rather traditional Industrial Engineering department, which was oriented toward manufacturing. But it has now been combined with two other academically more glamorous departments, one previously named Operations Research and the other Engineering Economic Systems. The result (Management Science and Engineering) is a larger, and academically perhaps more successful department, but contains few faculty members who could design a factory or program a robot. I once chaired a School of Engineering study by a committee including professors from many parts of the University who were interested in manufacturing, which I thought detailed an excellent university-wide program in manufacturing. It was not accepted, partly because it included a co-op program involving industry—clearly below the lofty nature of the university.
The Engineering School presently contains a strong design group in the Mechanical Engineering Department, and the very popular Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, both of which stress creative design, But the Product Realization Laboratory of the design group (mentioned in previous posts), chaired by Professor David Beach, which focuses on integrated design and manufacturing, is the only formal group in the school that is dedicated to the manufacture of hardware. And traditionally, although extremely successful at its work, it has had problems defining and securing funding for research and hiring tenure-line faculty. I will suggest that it invite Obama to join its advisory board.
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