Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities by Peter Hirshberg & Dale Dougherty & Marcia Kadanoff

Author:Peter Hirshberg & Dale Dougherty & Marcia Kadanoff [Hirshberg, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781680452600
Publisher: Maker Media, Inc
Published: 2016-10-06T21:00:00+00:00

The Importance of Clustering around our Strengths

These factors are leading to a resurgence in manufacturing of all types, shapes, and sizes in U.S. cities. It is still the case that manufacturing capabilities inside U.S. cities are spread out, without the density one sees in a city like Shenzhen, China.

To build lasting competitive advantages, we believe it is important to pay attention to density, to build manufacturing resources not just in a city but also in the surrounding region. Regional clustering is important to enable fast cycle time so that Makers can create a design, see it produced, and iterate to perfect that design for its intended use and for manufacturability.

This idea, that clustering leads to competitive advantage, is not a new one. It’s been around since at least 2009 based on the pioneering work by Professor Michael Porter at the Harvard Business School3.

In their book, The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation, authors van Agtmael and Bakker (2016) argue that the era of cheap is over and that we now compete in the era of smart.

Likewise, Deloitte believes that the kind of advanced manufacturing4 the U.S. needs to develop in order to build lasting competitiveness will come from relying on predictive analytics, the internet of things (sensors), and advanced materials. In other words, the products we manufacture here will have relatively complex technology inputs.

Keep this in mind as we talk through the examples below. At the end of the chapter, we’ll talk about the future of advanced manufacturing inside the Maker City.

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