U.S. industry faced a gloomy outlook in the late 1980s. Then, industrial performance improved dramatically through the 1990s and appears pervasively brighter today. A look at any group of industries, however, reveals important differences in the factors behind the resurgenceâ€"in industry structure and strategy, research performance, and location of activitiesâ€"as well as similarities in the national policy environment, impact of information technology, and other factors. U.S. Industry in 2000 examines eleven key manufacturing and service industries and explores how they arrived at the present and what they face in the future. It assesses changing practices in research and innovation, technology adoption, and international operations. Industry analyses shed light on how science and technology are applied in the marketplace, how workers fare as jobs require greater knowledge, and how U.S. firms responded to their chief competitors in Europe and Asia. The book will be important to a wide range of readers with a stake in U.S. industrial performance: corporate executives, investors, labor representatives, faculty and students in business and economics, and public policymakers.

"This study was requested by the House Committee on Ways and Means in a letter dated March 8, 2000. The Committee requested that the U.S. International Trade Commission (the Commission) examine the ability of the U.S. civil aerostructures industry to compete over the short and long terms with those industries in Europe, Canada, and to the extent possible, Asia. The Commission's report examines the composition and recent trends of the large civil aircraft (LCA) aerostructures industry; the process of new aerostructures development; the means and trends of government support for research and development; and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the aerostructures industries in these countries and regions, for the period 1995-99 and to the extent possible, 2000"--Publisher description

The American economy faces two deep problems: expanding innovation and raising the rate of quality job creation. Both have roots in a neglected problem: the resistance of Legacy economic sectors to innovation. While the U.S. has focused its policies on breakthrough innovations to create new economic frontiers like information technology and biotechnology, most of its economy is locked into Legacy sectors defended by technological/ economic/ political/ social paradigms that block competition from disruptive innovations that could challenge their models. Americans like to build technology "covered wagons" and take them "out west" to open new innovation frontiers; we don't head our wagons "back east" to bring innovation to our Legacy sectors. By failing to do so, the economy misses a major opportunity for innovation, which is the bedrock of U.S. competitiveness and its standard of living. Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors uses a new, unifying conceptual framework to identify the shared features underlying structural obstacles to innovation in major Legacy sectors: energy, air and auto transport, the electric power grid, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, health care delivery and higher education, and develops approaches to understand and transform them. It finds both strengths and obstacles to innovation in the national innovation environments - a new concept that combines the innovation system and the broader innovation context - for a group of Asian and European economies. Manufacturing is a major Legacy sector that presents a particular challenge because it is a critical stage in the innovation process. By increasingly offshoring production, the U.S. is losing important parts of its innovation capacity. "Innovate here, produce here," where the U.S. took all the gains of its strong innovation system at every stage, is being replaced by "innovate here, produce there," which threatens to lead to "produce there, innovate there." To bring innovation to Legacy sectors, authors William Bonvillian and Charles Weiss recommend that policymakers focus on all stages of innovation from research through implementation. They should fill institutional gaps in the innovation system and take measures to address structural obstacles to needed disruptive innovations. In the specific case of advanced manufacturing, the production ecosystem can be recreated to reverse "jobless innovation" and add manufacturing-led innovation to the U.S.'s still-strong, research-oriented innovation system.

Originally published in 1988, this volume outlines the need for a series of organisational reforms, new studies and committees to focus attention on mobilization issues and to provide an administrative framework for enhancing the mobilization base. The authors point out that mobilization is becoming a more viable US national security option. Case studies are used around raw materials of petroleum, ferroalloys, machine tools and semi-conductors which highlight common problems of diminishing domestic market share and growing reliance on foreign sector capacity, declining profits, research and development expense, a decline of skilled labour and economic decline in subsector industries