The Smartest Places on Earth
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Labaye, Eric, Svent Smit, Eckart Windhagen, Richard Dobbs, Jan Mischke, and Matt Stone. “A Window of Opportunity for Europe.” McKinsey Global Institute, June 2015.
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Articles
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Cao, Cong. “Patent Picture Overblown: China May Lead the World in Patents, but They Are Not Necessarily Innovative.” China Daily–Africa Weekly, March 1–7, 2013.
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NOTES
Preface to the Paperback Edition
1. Clinton won with a margin of 16.2 percent (56.2 percent vs. 40.0 percent for Trump) vs. Obama’s margin of 14.4 percent (56.6 percent vs. 42.2 percent) in 2012, although she lost Pennsylvania with 47.6 percent vs. 48.8 percent for Trump, in contrast to Obama’s 52.0 percent vs. Romney’s 46.8 percent in 2012.
2. “Building Prosperity by Strengthening the Innovation Ecosystem,” Ontario Economic Summit, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, November 2–4, 2016.
3. European Commission, “European Commission Will Launch €1 Billion Quantum Technologies Flagship,” May 17, 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/european-commission-will-launch-eu1-billion-quantum-technologies-flagship.
4. Louis Hoeks, “Op de boerderij leerde ik dat wegduiken geen optie is,” Het Financieele Dagblad (Amsterdam), June 3, 2016.
5. Fred Bakker, “De kennisdelers van het AddLab,” Het Financieele Dagblad (Amsterdam), February 20, 2016.
6. Mackenzie Carpenter and Deborah Todd, “The Google Effect: How Has the Tech Giant Changed Pittsburgh’s Commerce and Culture?,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 7, 2014.
7. Discussion with Curtis Porter during authors’ visit to Pittsburgh on March 23–24, 2014.
8. That ranks it fifth in National Institutes of Health funding.
9. Meeting with Randal Bryant in Pittsburgh on March 24, 2014. Bryant was succeeded by Andrew Moore, who had been hired away earlier from Carnegie Mellon by Google but returned to set up the Google office in Pittsburgh and then came back to CMU.
10. Daniel Moore, “A Year After Uber Hired Away Researchers, CMU Robotics Center Rebounds,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 7, 2016.
11. Carpenter and Todd, “The Google Effect.”
12. Discussion with Curtis Porter, Pittsburgh, March 24, 2014.
13. Bob Bauder, “Groups Invest in $50 Million Homewood Residential Development,” TribLive, June 26, 2016, http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/10682 646-74/housing-homewood-pittsburgh.
14. Carpenter and Todd, “The Google Effect.”
15. Interview with Mayor Bill Peduto during visit to Pittsburgh on March 24, 2014.
Introduction: Welcome to the Brainbelt
1. Jeffrey R. Immelt, “The CEO of General Electric on Sparking an American Manufacturing Renewal,” Harvard Business Review (March 2012).
2. The University of Texas has 48,000 students, including 8,000 engineering students and a strong computer science department supported by grants from the Gates and Dell Foundations. Austin is also home to more than 3,600 biotech firms and nearly 1,000 private scientific R&D firms with over 20,000 employees (www.biospace.com/News/top-12-hot-biopharma-regions-for-growth-and/347389). Texas ranked second in the nation for the number of physicists and life scientists. The Texas Emerging Technology Fund was created by the Texas legislature in 2005 to support R&D and emerging technologies and has distributed over $525 million in grants, half to universities and half to 145 e
arly stage companies (www.ce.org/i3/Move/2015/March-April/Tech-Hub-Austin.aspx). In 2014, the National Science Foundation designated the University of Texas at Austin, Rice University, and Texas A&M as an Entrepreneurial Innovation Node with a $3.75 million grant (news.utexas.edu/2014/08/26/nsf-i-corps-node). Austin has a large and growing gaming and Internet industry.
Chapter 1: Sharing Brainpower and Smart Manufacturing
1. “Intel in Oregon,” Intel, at www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/intel-in-oregon.html.
2. See www.qiagen.com for a company overview.
3. See the Toolpoint for Lab Science website, at www.toolpoint.ch.
4. To give just a few examples, people such as William Shockley, who was instrumental in developing the transistor at Bell Labs but moved to California and whose colleagues went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor (after Sputnik and President Kennedy’s announcement of the race to the moon, a natural candidate for NASA funding) and later Intel; Lee de Forest, an early pioneer of the vacuum tube; and William Hewlett and David Packard, Stanford graduates (with their oscilloscope, and later their PC and ink jet printer), who were among the first to move from their garage to the Stanford Industrial Park. They built on earlier strength in the region (often on the basis of defense contracts) in the areas of telegraph, short-wave radio, and very high frequency transmission as well as radar and aerospace.
5. Fred Bakker and Jeroen Molenaar, “Duurzaamheid als drijfveer voor innovatie” (Sustainability as a driver behind innovation), Het Financieele Dagblad, May 5, 2012, Amsterdam.
6. See poet-dsm.com.
7. These statements were excerpted from an interview conducted at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with President Shirley Ann Jackson and Vice President of Research and Professor of Biology Jonathan Dordick, August 24, 2013.
8. Interview with Lesley Spiegel, June 12, 2014, Zurich.
9. Now in a strategic alliance with Sonoco Alloyd, the sealing-machines unit of Sonoco Products Co., will provide fully automated custom packaging lines and complement Sonoco’s Sawyer collaborative robot for machine tensing and circuit board testing (see Zacks.com, August 12, 2015).
10. MIT’s Media Lab has made the Cambridge-Boston area one of the main American research centers on robotics, together with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. Just as Rethink Robotics focuses “above the belt,” another MIT spin-off, Boston Dynamics (now owned by Google), has concentrated its efforts “below the belt” on balance and motion. Backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), it has developed a number of innovative four-legged robots that can move at high speed. Its Atlas can carry high loads and clear debris. Japan’s Schaft, which was also acquired by Google (clearly making robotics one of its future priorities), won the December 2013 DARPA Robotics challenge that ranked the top sixteen humanoid robots for its $2 million prize. Also in Japan, Honda’s Asimo looks humanlike and can walk up and down stairs, talk, kick a soccer ball, and bring coffee.
11. Rethink Robotics’ closest competitor for second-generation factory robots is Denmark’s Universal Robots that sells 800–1,000 single-armed robots per year for about $26,000 each to companies such as Bosch, BMW, and Samsung. Its UR-5 and UR-10 robots cost more and are far less versatile but carry a higher load, are faster (they can move up to one meter per second, or a little over one yard), more accurate, and have a longer life of nearly twenty years, which makes them even cheaper to operate at only $1 per hour. Data from Casey Nobile, Robotics Business Review, Perspectives 2013.
12. There are many sensor-equipped, mobile research robots but, as of now, few factory robots, made by traditional robot makers or start-ups. Leading industrial robot maker Kuka in Germany has a one-armed Light Weight Robot (LWR) that can play Ping-Pong just like TOPIO, developed by Tosy Robotics. ABB’s FRIDA (Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-arm Assembly) was introduced in 2011. Motoman Inc., the American robotic subsidiary of Yaskawa Electric in Japan, is on its fourth generation of dual-arm robots (the SDA series) with payloads up to 44 pounds that can pick out different-colored Lego blocks and assemble tiny electronic components. The Italian Institute of Technology developed the COMAN robot with the ability to walk and balance in rough terrain. Meka Robotics, cofounded by Aaron Edsinger, who worked with Rodney Brooks, makes small robots for research labs. Companies in Japan, the United States, Germany, South Korea, Turkey, Iran, and China are working on better, faster, and more versatile robots. Sources: Perspectives 2013 and Wikipedia.
13. Based on discussions with Phil Knight at Brookings in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2013, and May 29, 2014. Also discussed in an interview with CEO Eric Sprunk at Nike Headquarters on October 15, 2014.
14. National Institute for Standards and Technology, Robotics Systems for Smart Manufacturing Programs, March 20, 2014.
15. The 3D printing process begins with a metal plate, called a substrate, which forms the base to which the first layer of the piece(s) will be attached. Because each layer is only about the thickness of a human hair, the substrate must be extraordinarily flat—within 1/1,000th of an inch—in order to avoid warping (even a slightly inclined surface would produce uneven layers). Plastic printers use nozzles to direct where the next layer of material should go. In metal printers, once a very thin layer of metal powder has been uniformly spread across the substrate, a high-powered laser etches specific areas to bind them to the previous layer. Excess metal particles are removed from the surface (for recycling back into the metal-powder supply) and the process is repeated.
16. Youngstown, once a major steel and transportation hub located halfway between New York City and Chicago, lost 60 percent of its population when the steel industry closed its doors.
17. The combination of congressional Republican resistance and sequestration blocked the requested funds from ever being released. In desperation, the president scraped together $40 million from the budgets of other federal agencies—including the Department of Defense, NASA, and the National Science Foundation—to kick-start one facility as a pilot project. With unusual speed, the federal government produced a Request for Proposal in only three weeks, which gave university institutes and industries across the country forty-five days to present proposals. In the end, the Ohio tech belt’s bid won the coveted contract, and together with Penn State, the first NAMII facility was set up in an old warehouse in Youngstown.
18. Technicians demonstrated for us three distinct types of experimental 3D printers. The first (and best known) is called a fused deposition modeling printer, first developed by Stratasys in the late 1980s, which resembles an ink jet printer that replaces sheets of paper with successive layers of quickly drying materials. Consumers can already purchase simplified versions of these machines for under $500. Second, a powder bed and binder jet (invented at MIT and manufactured by Z Corporation) does not use a nozzle but looks more like a machine that builds sand dunes. Finally, a selective laser-sintering machine (SLM), developed at the University of Texas in Austin under a DARPA grant, fuses different materials together, ranging from plastics to metals, in layers as thin as 30–40 nanometers. Visit to NAMII on June 13, 2013.
19. Charles Hull, cofounder of 3D Systems in the United States, built the first 3D printer in 1984. Although it was primarily used for building prototypes at first, researchers around the world are now in a race to test the process to work at a speed that allows its use in manufacturing with an immense variety of shapes and materials.
20. Marco Annunziata, “Welcome to the Age of the Industrial Internet,” TED Talk, December 17, 2013.
21. Travis Hessman, “The Dawn of the Smart Factory,” Industry Week, February 14, 2013.
22. Ibid.
23. See Chapter 5 on the difficulties the GE energy storage business has experienced with technology as well as demand, despite lofty expectations when it opened.
Chapter 2: Connectors Creating Communities
1. Interview with Alain Kaloyeros, August
22, 2013, in Albany; all Kaloyeros quotes in this chapter are from this interview.
2. After its start in 2004.
3. This involves a lithography method using EUV (extreme ultraviolet) wavelength, but its use in manufacturing has been delayed because R&D has not yet solved the problem of doing this without requiring too much electric power. It seems that the cost of lithography has become the dominant stumbling block for moving to the next generation of semiconductors.
4. Chelsea Diana, “Angels Open Wallets for SUNY Polytechnic Battery Start-Up,” Albany Business Review, April 9, 2015.
5. Jackson further says, “We are proud to say that at RPI we like to work on the hard problems, the earliest stage of innovation, fundamental research. Only universities can do this now. That is why only 10 percent of our $100 million research program is supported by industry and 10 percent by New York State but 80 percent by the federal government and the reverse of what you see at the Nanotechnology Center. At RPI, we have had our own partnership with IBM and the State of New York since 2006 to set up the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations for this purpose. We do that with the help of a petascale supercomputer. Petascale computers, among the world’s fastest supercomputers, are used in advanced simulations in such diverse fields as climate, fusion science, and quantum chemistry. In fact, we will soon have the most powerful supercomputer of any university that is among the thirty fastest in the world. We are making our own big bet on the use of big data. I am not talking here about crunching massive amounts of data but about using them for insights in very fundamental research. We are good at that here at RPI, where engineering traditionally has been a huge strength.” Interview, August 21, 2013.
6. GlobalFoundries is owned largely by Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Investment Co. It was created when Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) divested its manufacturing arm in 2009 and GlobalFoundries then acquired Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in 2010. It is about one-fourth the size of the largest foundry, TSMC in Taiwan. Plant visit and interview with Mike Russo, August 21, 2014.