With a grant from the Kauffman Foundation, the IPC is leading one of the PIE research modules focused on the question of how innovative companies scale production. The study examines how innovations move from the laboratory to early production and later stage commercial production. The objectives of the PIE Scale-Up Module are to:

Determine how entrepreneurial firms make strategic production decisions as they move their innovations from idea to early stage production to later stage commercial production

Understand whether there are systemic barriers or obstacles that hinder the scaling of companies in general, and for those that grow, hinder their growth in the U.S.

Team Members include:

Professor Richard Lester
Professor Fiona Murray
Dr. Elisabeth Reynolds
Professor Charlie Sodini
Professor Oli de Weck

Graduate students
Victoria del Campo, DUSP
Joyce Lawrence, Political Science
Hiram Samel, Sloan

Production

While the U.S. remains a world leader in technological innovation and entrepreneurship, concerns have been raised about the country’s ability to capture more of the downstream economic benefits associated with these strengths in a way that benefits the economy and the population as a whole. Specifically, as new companies in innovative industries grow and scale up their operations, they face a wide range of options as to how and where to scale up. While the off shoring of low value-added, more commodity-driven production began decades ago, today there are signs that even higher value-added production with more sophisticated engineering and manufacturing is also being conducted off shore. This potentially results in the loss of U.S. innovative capabilities and capacities, since the ability to innovate in a new industry or technology is often tightly linked with manufacturing expertise.

The IPC is part of a new MIT initiative, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE), which seeks to analyze the state of production in the United States and to propose new routes from innovation through manufacturing to jobs and growth in the United States. PIE is an Institute-wide effort, modeled on the successful Made in America project of 20 years ago, which led to the creation of the IPC. The project brings together MIT faculty from a variety of disciplines -- economics, engineering, political science, management, biology, and others -- to look at U.S. industry in comparative perspective. The IPC will focus on the various stages of the scaling up of production, from prototypes to large-scale commercial production, to understand what factors influence firms’ production decisions with respect to how and where they manufacture.

The IPC is also working at the regional level with leaders in Massachusetts in the biomanufacturing industry to understand how the region, a global leader in the industry, can maintain and further its innovative capacity in the industry as it becomes more globally competitive.

Biomanufacturing

Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE)