In 1989, the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity produced the Made in America report. One of the recommendations of Made in America was to establish the Industrial Performance Center (IPC) to carry on the interdisciplinary investigations of industrial productivity, innovation, and competitiveness that the Commission had begun. Established in 1991, with the help of a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the IPC has brought together faculty and students from all five MIT Schools in research collaborations on industry. Since its inception, the faculty, students and affiliates of the IPC have produced numerous books, articles, papers and other publications that have advanced the understanding of strategic, technological, and organizational developments in a broad range of industries.
Project | October 16, 2023
MIT Automation Clinic
The Automation Clinic is an applied research and education program to understand how organizations make new technologies work in practice. MIT researchers and their partners work with organizations to learn the problems they aim to solve with new technologies, the challenges they face in deploying them, and the consequences for their workers, customers, and society. […]
Working Paper | October 9, 2023
The Transistor, an Emerging Invention: Bell Labs as a Systems Integrator Rather Than a ‘House of Magic’
The transistor is one of the most consequential human inventions with dissemination of the eventual MOS-FET design estimated to exceed one quintillion devices. However, the transistor’s genesis remains poorly understood. Many received accounts associate transistor invention closely with a small group of Bell Labs scientists during the 1947-1948 period. This paper argues that such a […]
Working Paper | October 9, 2023
Models for Building Regional Manufacturing Economies: From ‘Home Alone’ to Regional Ecosystems
At the national level, U.S. manufacturing has suffered from slow productivity, wage, and job growth for decades. At the regional level, industrial decline has hollowed out once-thriving industrial cities.
Article | October 9, 2023
The State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Technologies, Challenges, and Key Research Directions
Robotics and related technologies are central to the ongoing digitization and advancement of manufacturing. In recent years, a variety of strategic initiatives around the world including “Industry 4.0”, introduced in Germany in 2011 have aimed to improve and connect manufacturing technologies in order to optimize production processes.
Article | October 9, 2023
How American Adults Obtain Work Skills: Results of a New National Survey
Employer-provided training is an important determinant of economic outcomes, yet our understanding of its extent and distribution is well out of date—with the most recent national survey being from 2008. This article updates our understanding of employer-provided training.
Article | September 24, 2023
A Smarter Strategy for Using Robots
Despite advances in automation technology, the promise of productive and flexible automation, with minimal involvement of human workers, is far from reality, for two main reasons. First, adoption of automation technology has been limited. Second, when firms do automate, what they gain in productivity they tend to lose in process flexibility, resulting in what the […]
Report | September 1, 2023
Building the Infrastructure for Innovation: Three Lessons from the CHIPS and Science Act
A spotlight is on the U.S. semiconductor industry. After decades of decline, there is a wave of new investment from private industry and the federal government to jumpstart domestic chipmaking with the goal of making U.S. semiconductor production more cost competitive and technologically advanced. Whereas the United States did not have any chipmaking capacity at […]
Working Paper | July 24, 2023
Radical Technological Innovations and How to Promote Them
New technologies that exhibit large (>10x) jumps in performance limits compared to incumbent technologies are radical technological innovations. This paper considers three cases that exhibit such jumps: the evolution of engines from the early 18th to the late 20th century (with the transition from coal-based steam engines to hydrocarbon-based internal combustion engines); the evolution of […]
Book | March 6, 2023
Learning by Building: Complementary Assets and the Migration of Capabilities in U.S. Innovative Firms
As policymakers in the United States debate how the economy can regain its vitality following the Great Recession, many see innovation as the key to prosperity.
Article | March 21, 2022
Unraveling the Silicon Valley Consensus
The Silicon Valley Consensus is that innovative cities grow faster than non-innovative ones—but that’s not always the case.
Article | March 21, 2022
Why Innovation Hubs Fail
Successful innovation hubs depend on who is leading, and how.
Article | March 21, 2022
Industrial Policy and Local Economic Transformation: Evidence From the U.S. Rust Belt
State and local governments frequently invest in policies aimed at stimulating the growth of new industries, but studies of industrial policy and related economic development initiatives cast doubt on their effectiveness.