Argonne National Laboratory Director Eric D. Isaacs says Smart Manufacturing Key to American Innovation

In a recent Huffington Post blog, Argonne National Laboratory Director Eric D. Isaacs observes that following "stunning sales in the last quarter, Apple just became the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, with a market value of $419 billion - proving yet again that American ingenuity and technological know-how remain unsurpassed in the global economy."

He then asks an interesting question about the reasons behind the overseas manufacturing of all of Apple’s products last year. Initially identifying the traditional view held on American companies chasing cheap labor in Asia as one possible explanation, Isaacs later underscores that today’s factories growing replacement of unskilled labor with high-tech automation is the conventional view’s limit. Ruling out that low-cost human could be the main reason, he points to education as the most plausible explanation for U.S firms’ preference for overseas job markets over our domestic market. It’s important to note that Isaacs’ findings are in alignment with those stated in our recent report Make: An American Manufacturing Movement.

In the 2007 Competitiveness Index, the Council showed that the lack of an educated workforce could pose a serious threat to the U.S. competitiveness in the long term. As discussed in Make, American Manufacturing was the bedrock of a century of American economic prosperity, therefore we must ensure that U.S. citizens are properly educated and trained to face the changes occurring in the global economy and affecting our manufacturing sector if we want to keep or create jobs at home. With an increasing focus on competitiveness among the world's nations, it appears obvious that we can’t hope to be the world’s cheapest labor force. Yet claiming the title of the world’s most innovative nation is an objective that we can and should strive to maintain.

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