Businessweek Cover Article: Can the Future be Built in America?

Council on Competitiveness President Deborah Wince-Smith; member Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE; and Craig Giffi, vice president of Deloitte, whose CEO, James Quigley, is a Council on Competitiveness member, are quoted in a story in the latest issue of Businessweek:

From its headquarters in a modest office park outside Sunnyvale, Calif., Bridgelux is hoping to spark a revolution in light fixtures for homes and offices across the U.S. It's ready to ramp up production of tiny light-emitting chips that blaze as bright as some incandescent bulbs but consume a fraction of the energy. To meet surging orders for its chips, it's prepared to spend $250 million over three years on gleaming cleanrooms. The question is, where should it put its plants?

For a host of strategic reasons, Bridgelux would like to keep manufacturing in the U.S., but financial realities point to Asia. Not only are taxes far lower and government incentives more generous in such nations as Malaysia, China, and Singapore, but it's easier to raise cheap funding offshore than in the U.S., where private investors frown on manufacturing and bank lending is nearly frozen. CEO Mark Swoboda calls the decision "the toughest challenge facing our company."

Not that long ago it didn't seem to matter where such companies made their stuff. After all, America has been inventing industries and losing them to Asia for decades, from color TVs to memory chips, personal computers, and liquid-crystal displays. While the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese plowed billions into megaplants to churn out commodity products, America steamed ahead in more lucrative pursuits, such as software, life sciences, and financial services. As for companies such as Dell and Apple, they could still reap high profits by focusing on marketing and design while letting offshore contractors handle the grunge work.

That situation has changed in dramatic ways. At a time when the U.S. is desperate for new sources of growth, Bridgelux and hundreds of other startups that represent the best hope for a manufacturing renaissance find it almost impossible to achieve scale in the U.S. It's troublesome because these companies are launching a blizzard of innovative products that promise to disrupt entire industries, including tiny diodes that could reshape the $100 billion global lighting business, fuel cells to power electric cars, and thin, flexible TV screens and solar panels. "When large transformations like this occur, everything gets reset with new winners and losers," says CEO Alan E. Salzman of San Bruno (Calif.) venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners, which has stakes in Bridgelux and 21 other clean-energy startups. "If you aren't in the game from the beginning, you don't get a second chance."

The good news is that the U.S. is at or near the cutting edge in most of the emerging product areas. Indeed, the new wave of high-tech devices hitting the market is the payoff from billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research at federal and university science labs stretching back to the 1960s, when the applications were but glimmers in the eyes of futurists.

Now the bad news: Unless the U.S. can magically resurrect its manufacturing base, the good-paying jobs from these breakthroughs will be offshore. Cheap Asian labor has little to do with it. Unlike other industries that fled to low-cost offshore havens, these emerging tech goods are made on highly automated production lines. The problem is, the U.S. is losing its lead in large-scale high-tech manufacturing.

You can see this in the balance of trade. In 2000 the U.S. exported $29 billion more high-tech products than it imported, notes Harvard Business School professor Willy C. Shih. Owing to a legacy of underinvestment in manufacturing, by 2007 that had turned into a $54 billion trade deficit.

The causes of this manufacturing decline "are numerous, complex, and a long time in the making," says Shih, a 14-year IBM veteran and former president of Eastman Kodak's digital consumer products unit. Two decades of unconstrained outsourcing to Asia have hollowed out much of America's base of suppliers, factory managers, and skilled technicians. U.S. private capital markets, meanwhile, are loath to tie up their billions in factories and machinery. In the boom years from 1994 to 1999, when the economy surged 26%, U.S. manufacturing capacity swelled by 44%, according to a BusinessWeek analysis of Federal Reserve Bank data. From 2002 through 2007, when the U.S. expanded by 17%, capacity rose a paltry 5%. Over that time, Chinese investment exploded.

Now many U.S. executives are calling for the kind of comprehensive game plans for nurturing industries found in Europe and Asia. Some 60% of North American manufacturing execs surveyed by Deloitte Research and the Manufacturing Institute said they believe U.S. competitiveness will decline further by 2012, and 77% said the U.S. needs a strategic approach to developing a manufacturing base.

At a National Business Summit panel in Detroit in mid-June, Dow Chemical CEO Andrew N. Liveris and Ford Motor Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. both openly called for "industrial policy," a term not heard much since the U.S. was under siege from Japanese cars, chips, and steel in the early 1980s. General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt declared that GE had probably gone too far in outsourcing manufacturing, engineering, and back-office service work and lambasted as "flat wrong" the notion that the U.S. could remain an economic superpower by relying on services and consumer buying.

The Obama Administration is certainly wading into industrial policy with its bailout of Detroit and aid for green-tech factories. Still, there is little talk about Washington mapping long-term strategies for industries. To do so would go against the philosophy that has guided U.S. policymakers for much of the postwar era, which is to focus federal spending on R&D while letting the market figure out how to commercialize technology. Rewriting corporate tax codes to favor manufacturing, meanwhile, would run into big political obstacles. Liberals tend to view tax cuts as corporate welfare, while many conservatives argue tax cuts should apply to all corporations and not favor specific sectors. Either way, says Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president of Washington's Council on Competitiveness, the U.S. suffers from "a total divorce between our tremendous investments in R&D and manufacturing."

Few industries better illustrate the disconnect than solar cells. Since the 1970s federally funded labs have produced many of the breakthroughs in cells that turn the sun's rays into electricity. Yet Japan commercialized panels for homes and businesses. Now China dominates the $30 billion global solar industry, making 35% of the world's cells and 49% of its polysilicon wafers, the main material used for solar cells. The U.S. makes just 5% of cells. A growing portion of solar equipment bought with U.S. tax credits is imported from China, where a capacity glut has sent prices crashing.

It's not too late for the U.S. to jump back into the game. Even though global demand for solar systems in homes is slow now, it is expected to triple in four years. Moreover, the technology is shifting to an American bastion of strength: cells made from thin coatings of elements on flexible materials, such as foil and polymers, that are far cheaper and easier to make than silicon wafers. "There is plenty of opportunity for the U.S. to take the lead here," says Michael J. Ahearn, CEO of First Solar, in Tempe, Ariz., the world's thin-film leader.

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What can Washington do to boost manufacturing competitiveness? It could bridge the disconnect between R&D and commercialization, as it has done in biotech. If the U.S. believes flexible displays, fuel cells, or solid-state lighting warrant billions in R&D, it should follow through with enough aid for product development and manufacturing.

To critics of government intervention, such measures smack of picking winners, but it's not as if that's something new to Washington. Agriculture and oil drilling remain heavily subsidized. The federal government was crucial to launching the aerospace, telecom, and Internet industries. Now it owns General Motors. "We do have an industrial policy," says Craig A. Giffi, vice-chairman of Deloitte Consulting. "What we don't have is a coherent industrial policy. We don't know what industries we want and where we are going."

Even short of an overarching strategy, there is a lot the U.S. can consider. Perhaps it's politically impossible to grant corporations 10-year tax holidays for building a factory, says ITII's Atkinson. But Washington could allow companies investing $100 million, say, in a new high-tech plant to write the entire sum off in the first year, rather than depreciate it over time. To create enough demand for large-scale domestic production of renewable energy equipment, the U.S. could impose European-style feed-in tariffs on all utilities.

And rather than dispense limited funds to a chosen few, Washington could offer low-cost loans for all new U.S. factories that can show they have a market and meet certain criteria. Or it could create an institution similar to the U.S. Export-Import Bank, which lends to companies so they can fill export orders.

The U.S. could even explore strategies used in certain emerging markets. Hau L. Lee, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, thinks America needs large industrial zones devoted to specific industries—similar to zones in Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and much of China. Such areas offer tax breaks, cheap or free land, workforce training, plenty of water and power, and agencies that serve as one-stop shops for all of the necessary permits and regulatory approvals. The idea isn't too far-fetched. The Interior Dept. hopes to set aside thousands of acres of federal land in the West for 13 solar power generation zones, with a special office in Nevada to approve projects quickly. Such zones also could include solar manufacturing plants.

Thinking like a developing nation may be a comedown for the world's greatest economic superpower. But that is the level to which America's manufacturing might has eroded. Unless it changes course, the U.S. not only won't be able to recapture industries it has lost—it may not be able to launch the new industries it invents. 

Read the entire story, and watch a video from writer Pete Engardio, here.