America’s “New Industrial Revolution”: NOT Re-Shoring Jobs, BUT New-Shoring Employment

3DP Media’s “NY3DP Summits” Roundtable on Re-industrialization at Brooklyn Navy Yard Finds New York Can Exploit City and Region Competitive Advantages To “New-Shore” Its Workforce.

On 24 September 2013—as part of our week-long NY3DP Summits event-set—we assembled a diverse team of six 3DP experts, industrial-manufacturing players, futurist thought-leaders and enterprise planners at BLDG 92, Visitor Center and Museum of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City.

We entitled this Roundtable “New Industrial Revolution: 3D-Printing Transformers, Nabes-Based Nanofactories & American Re-Shoring.” Our challenging subtitle was: “Will New York City Spearhead America’s Manufacturing Make-Over Via Home-Grown, Disruptive 3DP Tech?”

Thanks to our sponsors BLDG 92, Autodesk and ITAC, this event presented a “suite” of activities at BLDG 92 and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. These offerings included a realtime 3DP Demonstration, Walking Tour of nearby Yard “DigiFab” manufacturers and New Lab Beta, our Roundtable Session and a Reception (sponsored by Autodesk).

I was pleased to help MC the event and moderate the Roundtable. Here were some of the concepts I had asked the Roundtablers to come prepared to discuss:

Will 3DP help propel an American manufacturing “make-over?” Will our City-fostered 3DP players help drive this change? And/or, will New York City (and State) grasp a commercially commanding position as a 3DP Cluster—or industrial-segment Ecosystem—for the betterment of our commonweal interests?

At the Roundtable, here are the two main questions I posed our conferees to initiate discussion and provoke the fertile exchange that followed:

(1) “Re-Shoring” is one of the new terms for bringing former U.S. manufacturing back to America from its “off-shore” locations. Given that digital fabrication continues to displace human labor — and will in re-shoring as well — how do you think American industrial ownership and labor can best cooperate to assure successful repatriation of production and its jobs impact?

(2) New Lab Beta is just a short block or two south of here. NLB has been funded by the City & State to help develop The Green Manufacturing Center by — among other things — prospectively occupying 84K square feet of space there. What neo-industrial processes do you believe New Lab should target to develop and why?

There was a beauty to our select group of assembled minds working our topics at this Roundtable. Every moderator hopes that the spontaneous synthesis and synergy naturally take discussions in new directions and deliver innovative ideas. All as a kind of self-sustaining reaction. And that is exactly what happened!

One of the Roundtable’s key, group-developed contentions was that the jobs that we have “off-shored” in the past are NOT—in the main—returning. China will NOT be giving back that low-wage work.

What WILL happen—driven by America’s new industrial technologies and innovating entrepreneurs—is that manufacturing employment in the U.S. will enjoy a renaissance. As a term of art and description, our conferees decided that phenomenon—of a new kind of workforce development and middle-class employment—should be called “new-shoring” or “future-shoring.” And, New York City (and State, by natural extension) is—in large part because of its lead in 3D Printing—the epicenter of this re-industrialization.

We video’d the entire session and here are the links to the Roundtable’s PART #1 and PART #2.

Enjoy this hour and a half of though-provoking interaction on your screen of choice. This Roundtable is a trove of knowledge that points to New-Shoring as a product of 3DP and Digital Fabrication. We’ll mine these rich veins for deeper explication—and show-case these new ideas driving this positive disruption for New York and the nation. Look to our further coverage of this seminal event in future posts right here.

C’mon Back!

LAND