What prompted you to begin this inquiry?
Michael Porter: There was a clear feeling at HBS that something different was happening in the U.S. economy this was not just a deep recession caused by the housing mortgage crisis and so forth. The recession is very real, but something more was going on. This project was born from that feeling, and the belief that the school could convene and analyze and understand in ways we had not taken full advantage of.
As Jan and I started looking at the data, a whole set of indicators validated disturbing trends that began well before the Great Recession.
You’ve had a lot of manufacturing experience.
Willy Shih: I spent 28 years in industry. I confronted a lot of puzzles there, and I’ve been looking at them since coming here.
The interesting question relating to competitiveness had to do with my time at Kodak. In 1997, I took over the consumer digital business it was trying to build. That year Kodak shipped a few tens of thousands of digital cameras. One of the factories in Rochester, New York, had this highly automated assembly line where the engineers were attempting to manufacture digital cameras locally. You needed a whole bunch of electronic and optical components: electronic sensors, the tiny displays that show you your pictures, rechargeable batteries, consumer-electronic stuff.