Production Systems and Technological Change
Examines how production technologies reorganize manufacturing practice and how organizational learning shapes their effective use and continued development.
Research Program 03
Manufacturing Technologies
Production, infrastructure, and industrial systems
Examines how technological knowledge becomes productive capability through manufacturing systems and the institutions that sustain them.
Manufacturing determines whether knowledge becomes durable capability.
Scientific advances become consequential when organizations can produce them reliably at scale. Manufacturing connects technical design to industrial capability through production systems that accumulate knowledge through practice.
Research examines how production technologies and institutions reshape one another, and why some manufacturing capabilities persist while others become difficult to reproduce.
Areas of inquiry
Core research domains
Industrial Infrastructure and Critical Technologies
Examines how specialized industrial infrastructures enable technological capability and how technological change creates new dependencies on difficult-to-reproduce production systems.
Production Networks and Industrial Resilience
Examines how production is organized across firms and places, how those relationships create industrial dependencies, and how production systems adapt when established arrangements are disrupted.
Industrial Capability and Institutions
Examines how institutions develop and sustain production knowledge, and how technological change alters the capabilities required for advanced manufacturing.
Guiding questions
- How do new technologies change the organization and capabilities of production systems?
- Which industrial capabilities are difficult to reproduce, and why do they become concentrated in particular organizations or places?
- How do relationships across production networks create resilience or vulnerability?
- How do organizations develop and sustain the expertise required for advanced production?
- Under what conditions can public institutions strengthen industrial capability without freezing existing technological arrangements?