Search

MIT President L. Rafael Reif commissioned the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future in the spring of 2018. He tasked us with understanding the relationships between emerging technologies and work, to help shape public discourse around realistic expectations of technology, and to explore strategies to enable a future of shared prosperity.

Several studies have highlighted the need to maintain and build manufacturing capabilities to support economic growth and have linked a nation’s as well as region’s strength in manufacturing to its ability to innovate.

Changes in advanced manufacturing technologies as well as the economics of manufacturing have significant implications for the location and spatial organization of production.

Since the early 2000s, state-led and innovation-focused strategies have characterized the approach to development pursued in countries around the world, such as China, India, and South Korea. Brazil, the largest and most industrialized economy in Latin America, demonstrates both the opportunities and challenges of this approach.

As we enter the new millennium, globalization has emerged as one of the most salient and powerful
forces shaping domestic and world economies. Accordingly, a debate has emerged in recent years
over the causes and consequences of globalization.

“Going global” by establishing or expanding foreign production capabilities has long played an important strategic role for firms in the automotive industry.

Scholars of technical change have long been interested in understanding the ways in which new technologies shape and are shaped by firms and industries. Much attention has been focused on the three fundamental questions in the field – How do technologies evolve?

Biomanufacturing, specifically of large molecules, is one of the most complex types
of manufacturing that exists. The challenge of scaling up living organisms combined with purifying their products to ensure safe administration to human beings creates a high risk process technically, financially, and from a public health perspective.