U.S. Manufacturing Hits a Wall When It’s Time to Scale | Xconomy.

Manufacturing isn’t dead in the U.S. But when it comes time to pump out products on a large scale, the pull of overseas economies and investors becomes too strong to resist.
That’s one of the conclusions from a group of MIT researchers tackling a wide-ranging study of the American production economy.

Their report aims to give a broad picture of the current state of manufacturing in the U.S., with an emphasis of how “production” industries ranging from heavy industry to biotech can compete in an era increasingly focused on intellectual heft and engineering prowess.

For one aspect of the study, which is called “Production in the Innovation Economy,” researchers looked at how non-software companies licensing technology from MIT fared in the wild from 1997 to 2008.