Boeing's chairman, Phil Condit, says that Boeing tried to accelerate its production too fast, without changing a production-engineering system that had barely altered since the second world war.
Navistar said it might have an opportunity to bid on a production contract once the engineering phase is complete, but said it still thinks its Saratoga JLTV, based on existing commercial trucks, is a cost-effective solution.
Lifetime employment once made sense, says Mr Murayama, because the company's strength lay in production engineering, and the ability to innovate through small engineering improvements requires a good deal of experience.
Koch tends to invest in industries that convert raw materials into higher-value products, with complicated operations that require a lot of engineering talent and constant innovation in production methods.
Other researchers point to bio-engineering as a potentially vital solution to the food production challenges posed by a growing world population.
Unlike most semiconductor executives, who often start in engineering or technology marketing, Mr. Appleton began at Micron as a production worker in 1983.
But oil companies are likely to invest less in boosting production if they are forced to divert billions of dollars toward reverse-engineering a smaller pipeline.
It currently provides a 9% tax deduction from net income for businesses engaged in "qualified production activities" in the U.S. Those activities include manufacturing a product, selling, leasing or licensing it, and engineering and software activities related to that production.
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In the typical production supply chain for consumer products, of which apparel production is a good example, the higher-value, pre-manufacturing activities like designing, engineering, and branding, and post-manufacturing activities like marketing, warehousing, transporting, and retailing happen in the United States, while the mostly lower-end manufacturing and assembly activities take place abroad.
Corporate clients might be harder to come by but would probably be drawn from sectors that deal with material sciences, particularly engineering or metallurgy, where a low-gravity environment would make possible types of research and production that are impossible or prohibitively expensive on Earth.
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