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Design for Location: Offshore Manufacturing and Technology Competitiveness

Prof. Fuchs’s research combines qualitative field research with engineering based decision tools to provide insight into the global drivers of technological change. At MIT, she studied the impact of manufacturing location on technology development incentives and thereby the technology trajectory of firms. She looked at two cases of emerging technologies: advanced composites in automobiles and integrated components in optoelectronics. In both cases, her results show that when US firms shift production from the United States to such countries as China, the most advanced technologies developed in the United States no longer pay. Production characteristics are different abroad, and earlier technologies can be more cost-effective in countries like China. Among other issues, this leaves the most advanced technologies abandoned, and, at least in the case of the optoelectronics industry, creates a barrier to returning production to the United States.

With her research group at Carnegie Mellon, Prof. Fuchs continues to study technology and global competitiveness, including (1) the role of the US government in seeding and encouraging new technology trajectories, (2) the consequences of offshore outsourcing for knowledge flows and production-floor learning within firms, and (3) the resiliency of the US innovation ecosystem to external shocks, including a critical set of firms moving manufacturing offshore.

US Optoelectronic Device Manufacturing Capability

Fuchs, E., E. B ruce, R., R am, and R. K irchain, “Process-Based Cost Modeling of Photonics Manufacture: The Cost-Competitiveness of Monolithic Integration of a 1550nm DFB Laser and an Electro-Absorptive Modulator on an InP Platform,” Journal of Lightwave Technology, 24(8), 3175–3186, 2006.

Fuchs, E., F. Field, R. Roth, and R. K irchain, “Strategic Materials Selection in the Automotive Body: Economic Opportunities for Polymer Composite Design,” Composite Science and Technology, 68(9), 1989–2002, 2008.