Cambridge Business Association
Make It In America
Book

Make It In America

The Case for Re-Inventing the Economy

Andrew N. Liveris
Wiley, 2011
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Andrew N. Liveris is chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company, vice chairman of the Business Council and a member of the Business Roundtable’s executive committee. Yet, unlike most of his peers, he advocates for more government intervention in the marketplace, not less. Liveris urges manufacturing executives and public policy makers to plan, develop and implement a comprehensive, government-led national program to revive American manufacturing. While typical corporations more often petition for lower corporate taxes (and then, inconsistently, sometimes seek government help), this corporate leader proposes a business-government partnership. getAbstract recommends Liveris’s call to action to manufacturing executives, government leaders and anyone with a stake in the long-term health of the US economy.

Summary

Lured Away

In 2007, Amazon.com engineers working in Silicon Valley’s Lab 126 developed a revolutionary handheld book reader featuring “electronic ink” that would enable users to see pages clearly in bright sunlight. This was the genesis of Amazon’s Kindle. The company contracted with E-Ink, a Massachusetts firm, to produce the electronic ink beads that made the Kindle work. E-Ink could make the ink, but not Kindle’s sophisticated screen. Amazon could not find a US firm capable of producing the screen it needed to bring the Kindle to market, so it contracted with a Taiwanese firm, Prime View, which immediately purchased E-Ink and relocated it to Taiwan, promptly strangling America’s nascent electronic ink industry.

This story is not unusual. It depicts what now occurs quite commonly in the shrinking US manufacturing sector. In another telling example, FormFactor, a California high-tech company, developed a reliable process in the 1990s for testing semiconductors, which must be perfect at the molecular level for proper operation. The semiconductor industry eagerly adopted FormFactor’s process. Recently, South Korea-based Phicom began manufacturing a FormFactor clone ...

About the Author

Andrew N. Liveris is the chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company. He is also the co-chair of President Barack Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a member of the Business Roundtable’s executive committee and vice chairman of the Business Council.

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