3 Questions: Suzanne Berger on converting innovation into growth

Since 2011, MIT faculty from several disciplines have collaborated on a unique research project, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE); the aim is to see how U.S. strengths in innovation can be turned into new production capabilities, to spur growth and new jobs. Their findings will be presented tomorrow at an MIT conference. MIT News spoke this week with Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman-Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT and a co-chair of the PIE Commission, about the effort. Q. What are the main findings of the PIE project? A. The key question of the PIE research for the past two-and-a-half years was: What kinds of production do we need in this country in order to get innovation to the market? We know that in the United States and at places like MIT, there are great new ideas coming out, but what would it take in order to get these new ideas about products and processes into the hands of customers? However great our ideas are, we're not going to be contributing to growth and new jobs unless we can move these ideas to the market. And so what we tried to do in the PIE research was discover the role of manufacturing in our ability to get innovation out there into the world. I think what we discovered is that manufacturing is very important in bringing good ideas, whether they come from the shop floor or the laboratory, through the stages of prototyping, pilot manufacturing, larger-scale production, and finally commercialization.