NIST Director: Manufacturing 'Transforms Innovative Ideas into Products'

A strong manufacturing sector that can convert discoveries and ideas into new products and processes is a necessary ingredient of strategies to maintain the nation's global competitiveness in science and technology, said National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director Patrick Gallagher.

With manufacturing firms responsible for 70% of all private sector research and development spending, prudent U.S. policies are needed to promote the health of the manufacturing sector, Gallagher said at the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Forum. That will support the innovation that is critical to economic growth and to solving national and global problems, he added.

“If we fail to advance the technology with which we produce things, we, in effect, cut off a leg and hurt our ability to remain competitive around the world,” Gallagher said at the 2010 AAAS Science & Technology Policy Forum. “There is a deep interplay between innovating something and manufacturing something.”

For more information on Patrick Gallagher's talk at the Forum, read the full story.