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Breaking the Death Grip of Legacy Technologies

Harvard Business Review

Technologies like 3-D printing, robotics, advanced motion controls, and new methods for continuous manufacturing hold great potential for improving how companies design and build products to better serve customers. Why are older incumbent firms slow to adopt new technologies even when the economic or strategic benefits are clear?

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Can Lean Manufacturing Put an End to Sweatshops?

Harvard Business Review

The conventional wisdom has ranged from skepticism that lean could be successfully applied in places like Vietnam and India, to the hypothesis that lean actually exposes workers to greater risk of exploitation and injury than mass manufacturing. The technologies and processes that are transforming companies. Insight Center.

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Innovating the Toyota, and YouTube, Way

Harvard Business Review

In terms of people, processes and technologies, Toyota and Google's YouTube have little in common. The more deeply Jim's essays discussed the nature of supplier relationships, work-flow and value creation in lean enterprise, the keener the connection with YouTube's Space. They don't just partner; they provide resources that add value.

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How Economists Got Income Inequality Wrong

Harvard Business Review

It says that markets determine wages, and any social or political tampering just creates inefficiency. In the 1990s, a whole subfield of economics reached "virtually unanimous agreement," as a survey in the Journal of Economic Perspectives noted , that in the context of technological change, markets themselves inevitably drove U.S.

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What You Won’t Hear About Trade and Manufacturing on the Campaign Trail

Harvard Business Review

Generally, what we see is the country where the final assembly of a product took place. Almost every sophisticated manufacturer uses some kind of lean production system that pulls raw materials in from a warehouse. A big reason is technological complexity. Regions that have thick markets of suppliers have a big advantage.