Why US manufacturing struggles?

I have gradually come to realize that manufacturing in the US has lost its risk taking soul.

Clayton Christensen talks about the only true job creation is via innovation.  Nearly all of my 20 plus years in manufacturing I have seen excellent lean 6 sigma optimizations, and mergers/acquisitions lead to great shareholder profits...but the problem for our country, no incremental growth in employment comes from these 2 activities (as Clayton points out).

One of the most productive times for me grew out of a manager willing to get some "no ROI" required capital funds for a factory operation.  This slush fund allowed good engineering discipline and the engineering group was able to drive great improvements for the factory.  The point is that my boss, his management, and the accountants/MBA's had to "let go", take a risk that the engineers could create value going after things that seemed risky and uncertain.  Seth Godin would call this "art."

Today almost all companies, large and small, incorporated, and privately held;  they all are so risk averse that they gradually give away any competitive advantage.

Michael Araten president of the K'nex company on a new robotic technology:   "we did a little more research and felt that these robots might be able to learn," he said. "And given the fairly disruptive price point that they're available at, we could make some investments, and if we're wrong, obviously, the downside was not super high, and if we're right, the potential upside is dramatic."

Why don't we see this kind of risk taking thought process more?

Introduce Plastic Injection Molding (PIM) into a classroom/shop?

Really cool kit at www.techkits.com

I wonder if a low melt plastic could be molded into a mold that was 3D printed in a higher melt temperature plastic?

STEM is failing!

Just ran across this on a website for mentoring of High School students (www.sparkprogram.org):

Spark is constantly recruiting mentors in all professions. Here are some of our most frequently requested fields:

• Computers/Video Game Design
• Animal Care
• Fashion and Cosmetology
• Culinary Arts
• Health Care
• Law
• Government and Safety
• Visual Arts
• Life/Environmental Science

Where are the technology and engineering fields?  Not requested!  Why?  I believe we are waiting too long (high school and a bit of middle school) to start enticing kids into technology and engineering fields.  I also believe that computers and video games are a good portal.  We just need to get kids from being consumers into be creators (got that from the MIT/Scratch people!).

What do you think?

Champions of Change????????????????????

I just spent 90 minutes watching how DC wants to fix the US economy.  You don't really want to watch it...what I find interesting is how the Whitehouse has created this "Champions of Change:  Make it in America" agenda that is great.  But politicians and many of the smart people (can they be the same?) from industry,academia, etc. default to the government must fix this.

Only Dale Dagherty from Maker Magazine and Maker Faires and possibly a few others really get it.

When you do a top down directive "Make it in America" and you must buy products made in America...what is the cost?  How can we exist in a global marketplace with a self preservation mode (aka protectionism)?

The US CTO, Anesh Chopra mentioned the "open source" nature of software and how that can be used to solve the cost of training.

A representative from Nielson Kellerman (Alex?) stated it well and I am paraphrasing her, "No amount of buy America will help if we aren't the best, if we aren't the most innovative."

There is the rub, innovation is fostered in the Maker culture, that Dale has become the front man for.  The anti DC as somebody put it in this video.

Political solutions do the opposite.  The Dept of Transportation forces the purchase of railing that is manufactured in the US.  If that product is the best and most innovative then the rest of the world will buy it without being forced to do so.  If the only purchaser of the rail is the US government because the technical people were forced to do it...what have we accomplished?

Dual model - removing the internet divide...

Good stuff!

http://monkeybrains.net/

This is what will get kids excited about technology careers!

The Gamification of Healthcare

By brianbuntz
Published: September 27, 2011

Share

A conference session at Health 2.0 titled “Gaming and Health 2.0” considered how the gaming industry is assuming a growing role in healthcare. Stefan Armstrong, the moderator of the event and HCP Marketing partner, explained that gaming is effective at “aligning incentives.”

Incentives, of course, are deeply embedded in everything we do as humans. (Just ask an economist). So it makes sense of to take advantage of them in a healthcare setting to help achieve goals such as improving patient compliance with treatment regimens. “Gaming is part of what it means to be human,” said Doug Goldstein, CEO of iConecto at the conference. “That’s part of why it’s so addictive.”

 

So, why not use gaming to help make healthcare treatments something they like to do" rather than somthing they should do?

 

A recent example of a game that seeks to do just that is PE Interactive; the platform was developed to help children diagnosed with cancer with their treatment. It was developed by Microsoft XNA and makes use of Sony’s PS3 Move motion controller. The inspiration for the software came when Grzegorz Bulaj, a professor at the University of Utah observed an 8-year-old cancer patient using an incentive spirometer. Bulaj told Develop that the device was “nothing more than a game that encourages activity to help healing."

 

Earlier this year, we covered another example of a video game developed to help children with their treatment. In that article, editor Thomas Blair asks “Can you imagine patients at a children's hospital squealing, ‘Whee!’ when prompted to undergo a round of physical therapy or diagnostic testing?”

 

From what I gathered at the conference, that’s the hope of some developers. For instance, Sean Baenen, the CEO of a company called SuperBetter recounted at the event that he personally used gaming for a healthcare application. Baenen had suffered a concussion two weeks prior to the event; he is still dealing with post-concussive syndrome. To deal with that, Baenen built a platform to help him recuperate. In the game, he assumes an avatar named “Sean the Concussion Slayer.” Doing so helps the users “to give themselves the permission to get better,” he said. And, over time, patients (or doctors) can use such platforms to gather data to track how effective patients are complying with treatment instructions. When someone in the audience asked “how to keep people honest”? Baenen explained: “The game is built instrinsically; if you cheat, you cheat yourself.”

 

Good advice.

 

—Brian Buntz

IQ - fixed or able to grow?

A few modern philosphers...assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism...With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgement and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.

Alfred Binet - Frenchman/inventor of IQ test

Isn't it ironic that we have taken Binet's invention and use it to define people?  He intended it to allow assessing where a child was at and to improve their IQ.