{"id":18586,"date":"2026-02-24T22:14:25","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T22:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/24\/a-boost-for-manufacturing\/"},"modified":"2026-02-24T22:14:25","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T22:14:25","slug":"a-boost-for-manufacturing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/24\/a-boost-for-manufacturing\/","title":{"rendered":"A boost for manufacturing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Several years ago, Suzanne Berger was visiting a manufacturing facility in Ohio, talking to workers on the shop floor, when a machinist offered a thought that could serve as her current credo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnology takes a step forward\u2014workers take a step forward too,\u201d the employee said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berger, to explain, is an MIT political scientist who for decades has advocated for the revitalization of US manufacturing. She has written books and coauthored reports about the subject, visited scores of factories, helped the issue regain traction in America, and in the process earned the title of Institute Professor, MIT\u2019s highest faculty honor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over time, Berger has developed a distinctive viewpoint about manufacturing, seeing it as an arena where technological advances can drive economic growth and nimble firms can thrive.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This stands in contrast to the view that manufacturing is a sunsetting part of the US economy, lagging behind knowledge work and service industries and no longer a prime source of jobs. To Berger, the sector might have suffered losses, but we should think about it differently now: Rather than being threatened by change, it can thrive on innovation.<\/p>\n

She is keenly interested in medium-size and small manufacturers, not just huge factories, given that 98% of US manufacturers have 500 or fewer employees. And she is interested, especially, in how technology can help them. Roughly one-tenth of US manufacturers use robots, for instance, a number that clearly disappoints her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her focus on these smaller manufacturers is pragmatic. The US is not going to bring back textile manufacturing or steelmaking jobs anytime soon. And although the tech giants have made some concessions to domestic manufacturing, all major product lines from all tech companies are made largely overseas. Small and midsize firms may also have more opportunities to be flexible and innovative.<\/p>\n

And in the middle of Ohio, there it was, in a simple sentence: Technology takes a step forward\u2014workers take a step forward too.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI think workers do recognize that,\u201d Berger says, sitting in her MIT office, with a view of East Cambridge out the window. \u201cPeople don\u2019t want to work on technologies of the 1940s. People do want to feel they\u2019re moving to the future, and that\u2019s what young workers also want. They want decent pay. They want to feel they\u2019re advancing, the company is advancing, and they are somehow part of the future. That\u2019s what we all want in jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now Berger is part of a new campus-\u00adwide effort to do something tangible about these issues. She is a co-director of MIT\u2019s Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), launched in May 2025, which aims to reinvigorate the business of making things in the US. The idea is to enhance innovation and encourage companies to tightly link their innovation and production processes. This lets them rapidly fine-tune new products and new production technologies\u2014and create good jobs along the way.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to work with firms big and small, in cities, small towns, and everywhere in between, to help them adopt new approaches for increased productivity,\u201d MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth explained at the launch of INM. \u201cWe want to deliberately design high-quality, human-centered manufacturing jobs that bring new life to communities across the country.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

An unexpected product<\/h3>\n

Whether she is examining data, talking to visitors about manufacturing, or venturing into yet another plant to look around and ask questions, Berger\u2019s involvement with the Initiative for New Manufacturing is just the latest chapter in a fascinating, unpredictable career.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once upon a time\u2014her first two decades in academia\u2014Berger was a political scientist who didn\u2019t study either the US or manufacturing. She was a highly regarded scholar of French and European politics, whose research focused on rural workers, other laborers, and the persistence of political polarization. After growing up in New Jersey, she attended the University of Chicago and got her PhD from Harvard, where she studied with the famed political scientist Stanley Hoffmann.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Berger joined the MIT faculty in 1968 and soon began publishing extensively. Her 1972 book, Peasants Against Politics<\/em>, argued that geographical political divisions in contemporary France largely replicated those seen at the time of the French Revolution. Her other books include The French Political System<\/em> (1974) and Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies<\/em> (1980), the latter written with the MIT economist Michael Piore.\u00a0<\/p>\n

By the mid-1980s, Berger was a well-established, tenured professor who had never set foot in a factory. In 1986, however, she was named to MIT\u2019s newly formed Commission on Industrial Productivity on the strength of her studies about worker politics and economic change. The commission was a multiyear study group examining broad trends in US industry: By the 1980s, after decades of postwar dominance, US manufacturing had found itself challenged by other countries, most famously by Japan in areas like automaking and consumer electronics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n
\"chart<\/p>\n
US BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Two unexpected things emerged from that group. One was a best-selling book. Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge<\/em>, coauthored by Michael Dertouzos, Richard Lester, and Robert Solow, rapidly sold 300,000 copies, a sign of how much industrial decline was weighing on Americans. Looking at eight industries, Made in America<\/em> found, among other things, that US manufacturers overemphasized short-term thinking and were neglecting technology transfer\u2014that is, they were missing chances to turn lab innovations into new products.<\/p>\n

The other unexpected thing to materialize from the Commission on Industrial Productivity was the rest of Suzanne Berger\u2019s career. Once she started studying manufacturing in close empirical fashion, she never really stopped.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cMIT really changed me,\u201d Berger told MIT News<\/em> in 2019, referring to her move into the study of manufacturing. \u201cI\u2019ve learned a lot at MIT.\u201d<\/p>\n

At first she started examining some of the US\u2019s important competitors, including Hong Kong and Taiwan. She and Richard Lester co-edited the books Made by Hong Kong<\/em> (1997) and Global Taiwan<\/em> (2005), scrutinizing those countries\u2019 manufacturing practices.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Christopher
Christopher Love, a co-director of MIT\u2019s Initiative for New Manufacturing<\/figcaption>
WEBB CHAPPELL<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Over time, though, Berger has mostly turned her attention to US manufacturing. She was a core player in a five-year MIT examination of manufacturing that led her to write How We Compete<\/em> (2006), a book about why and when multinational companies start outsourcing work to other firms and moving their operations overseas.<\/p>\n

She followed that up by cochairing the MIT commission known as Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), formed in 2010, which looked closely at US manufacturing, and coauthored the 2013 book Making in America<\/em>, summarizing the ways manufacturing had started incorporating advanced technologies. Then she participated extensively in MIT\u2019s Work of the Future study group, whose research concluded that while AI and other technologies are changing the workplace, they will not necessarily wipe out whole cohorts of employees.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuzanne is amazing,\u201d says Christopher Love, the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and another co-\u00addirector of the Initiative for New Manufacturing. \u201cShe\u2019s been in this space and thinking about these questions for decades. Always asking, \u2018What does it look like to be successful in manufacturing? What are the requirements around it?\u2019 She\u2019s obviously had a really large role to play here on the MIT campus in any number of important studies.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cIf I have a great idea for a new drug or food product \u2026 if I have to ship it off somewhere to figure out if I can make it or not, I lose time, I lose momentum, I lose financing.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Christopher Love<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cShe always asks challenging questions and really values the collaboration between engineering and social science and management,\u201d says John Hart, head of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, director of the Center for Advanced Production Technologies, and the third co-director, with Berger and Love, of the Initiative for New Manufacturing.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Love adds, \u201cthe number of people she\u2019s trained and mentored and brought along through the years reflects her commitment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For instance, Berger was the PhD advisor of Richard Locke, currently dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management. Separately, she spent nearly two decades as director of MISTI, the MIT program that sends students abroad for internships and study. Basically, Berger\u2019s footprints are all around MIT.<\/p>\n

And now, in her 80s, she is helping to lead the Initiative for New Manufacturing. Indeed, she came up with its name herself. The initiative raises a couple of questions. What is new in the world of US manufacturing? And what can MIT do to help it?<\/p>\n

Home alone<\/h3>\n

To start with, the Initiative for New Manufacturing is an ongoing project designed to enhance many aspects of US manufacturing. Berger\u2019s previous efforts ended in written summaries\u2014which have helped shape public dialogue around manufacturing. But the new initiative was not designed with an endpoint in mind.<\/p>\n

Since last spring, the Initiative for New Manufacturing has signed up industry partners\u2014Amgen, Autodesk, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens\u2014with which it may collaborate on manufacturing advances. It has also launched a 12-month certificate program, the Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), in partnership with six universities, community colleges, and technology centers. The courses, held at the partner institutions, give manufacturing employees and other students the chance to study basic manufacturing principles developed at MIT.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe hope that the program equips manufacturing technologists to be innovators and problem-solvers in their organizations, and to effectively deploy new technologies that can improve manufacturing productivity,\u201d says Hart, an expert in, among other things, 3D printing, an area where firms can find new manufacturing applications.<\/p>\n

But to really grasp what MIT can do today, we need to look at how manufacturing in the US has shrunk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first few decades after World War\u00a0II were a golden age of American manufacturing. The country led the world in making things, and the sector accounted for about a quarter of US GDP throughout the 1950s. In recent years, that figure has hovered around 10%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1959 there were 15 million manufacturing jobs in the US. By 1979, the rapidly growing country had around 20\u00a0million such jobs, even as the economy was diversifying. But the 1980s and the first decade of the 2000s saw big losses of manufacturing jobs, and there are about 12.8 million in the US today.<\/p>\n