Innovation in America

Posted on September 24, 2010 by helpmyresume

Mark Adkins

There is no question that innovation (as defined by President Obama) is THE engine for growth and prosperity in America. With a long tradition of innovators, in particular Thomas Edison and his R&D Center at Menlo Park, the United States has been the world’s leader in innovation. Yet it seems that other nations are bypassing the U.S. and that is of great concern. The recent NAM/BCG Survey on Innovation ranked the United States eighth in the world behind nations such as Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland.

There are two critical areas that are holding back our ability to lead the world again in innovation. One is based around a lack of information. We lack data and therefore do not act aggressively to elevate our inventiveness. The other is policy based and can be fixed by local, state and the federal governments.

We have no baseline of innovation activity. There is no active, current measurement for innovation activity in the U.S. There are over a half dozen indexes, reports and surveys that are published annually that contain innovation in their titles but the really don’t give business and government a solid measurement of innovation ACTIVITY. The PDMA is studying a proposal to establish a monthly Product & Service Index (PSI) modeled after the Institute of Supply Chain Management’s Purchasing Managers’ Index (The PMI). This monthly report would tell the nation if our level innovation activity is increasing or decreasing. With this index in the news each month politicians and business leaders would be forced to deal with statistical proof a declining level of innovation activity in our nation.

The second critical area is: We are failing to innovate our manufacturing processes. We all know how high the jobless rate is and politicians decry jobs moving off-shoring but the fundamental answer to manufacturing job loss is AUTOMATION. Innovating manufacturing processes is just another name for automation and we have some of the world’s leading automation companies right here in the U.S. yet we fail to invest in automation and watch jobs go to either low cost nations like China or high productivity nations like Germany. In 2000, as reported by the Association of Manufacturing Technology (AMT), the amount of investment in new manufacturing technology was $6B. By 20009 that number had plummeted to $2B. Opening up lending for capital equipment and extending tax credits for both New Product Development and New Process Development would stimulate investment, create jobs and improve the competitiveness of the U.S.

I was asked if I thought businesses or individuals were holding back American Innovation. My answer is NO. What we are suffering from is a lack of information (Give us an Innovation Index) and too little investment in innovating our manufacturing processes (Give us Automation). These solutions will move us back to the top!

About Mark Adkins

Mark Adkins currently serves on the board of directors of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) and is PDMA’s Vice President of Marketing. Mark also helped found the Cincinnati Chapter of PDMA in 2000 and in 2010 helped launched the Pittsburgh Chapter of the PDMA currently serving as their president.

Mark is the founder & president of Smart Hammer Innovation a consulting business that applies Lean principles to new product and market development. Its customer base is B2B industrial firms that are seeking profitable growth through product and service innovation. In his career Mark and his teams have led development projects that have launched numerous new products with lifetime sales of over $1B.

About PDMA

The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) is the premier global advocate for product development and management professionals. Its mission is to improve the effectiveness of individuals and organizations in product development and management. PDMA accomplishes this by providing resources for professional development, information, collaboration and promotion of new product development and management. For more information about PDMA’s 34^th Annual Global Conference on Product Innovation Management, visit http://2010conference.pdma.org, follow on Twitter @PDMAintl or connect on LinkedIn.