Gary P. Pisano

why America needs a manufacturing renaissance

Producing prosperity

The DNA of Sustained Innovation

Creative Construction

Why has the biotechnology industry failed to perform up to expectations? This book attempts to answer this question by providing a critique of the industry. It reveals the causes of biotech's problems and offers an analysis on how the industry works. It also provides prescriptions for companies, seeking ways to improve the industry's performance.

The Promise, the Reality, and the Future of Biotech

Science Business

Steven C. Wheelwright

Robert H. Hayes

Robert Hayes

David Upton

Steven Wheelwright

David M. Upton

Hayes is a founder of the Operations Strategy field, and all four authors are on the Harvard Business School faculty. In Operations, Strategy, and Technology: Pursuing the Competitive Edge--the long-awaited follow-up to the highly successful classic, Restoring Our Competitive Edge--Bob Hayes, Gary Pisano, Dave Upton, and Steve Wheelwright take a fresh look at the foundations of corporate success. This book addresses the basic principles that guide the development of a powerful operations organization, and describes how a company's operating and technological resources can be applied to create a sustainable competitive advantage in today's "new" (global and IT-intensive) economy. Achieving a competitive advantage through superior operations is what the authors refer to as the "operations edge."

Pursuing the Competitive Edge

Operations, Strategy, and Technology

When the pharmaceuticals giant Merck reports promising results for a potential "blockbuster" drug, the story makes the evening news. Now, at a time when new product development has become critical to success in so many industries, The Development Factory proves that process innovation - not just product innovation - can be the key to competitive edge. In this multiyear study of pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms, Gary Pisano explores the dynamics of superior product and process development in a highly competitive industry that lives and dies by its R&D and depends heavily on rapid time to market. His work reveals that behind the success of many new product introductions lies the development of novel process technologies that provide lower costs, higher quality, and increased flexibility. Pisano challenges the widely held product-process life cycle view of competition, which suggests that industries tend to emphasize either product innovation or process innovation. He also questions the notion that there is a conflict between pursuit of product innovation and pursuit of lower costs, arguing that product development and process development capabilities are complementary. Extending the lessons to a wide variety of manufacturing industries, The Development Factory will guide companies toward unlocking the potential of process development and understanding the patterns of organizational behavior and managerial actions that help create and implement new capabilities over time.

Unlocking the Potential of Process Innovation

The Development Factory

Willy C. Shih

Manufacturing’s central role in global innovation Companies compete on the decisions they make. For years—even decades—in response to intensifying global competition, companies decided to outsource their manufacturing operations in order to reduce costs. But we are now seeing the alarming long-term effect of those choices: in many cases, once manufacturing capabilities go away, so does much of the ability to innovate and compete. Manufacturing, it turns out, really matters in an innovation-driven economy. In Producing Prosperity, Harvard Business School professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih show the disastrous consequences of years of poor sourcing decisions and underinvestment in manufacturing capabilities. They reveal how today’s undervalued manufacturing operations often hold the seeds of tomorrow’s innovative new products, arguing that companies must reinvest in new product and process development in the US industrial sector. Only by reviving this “industrial commons” can the world’s largest economy build the expertise and manufacturing muscle to regain competitive advantage. America needs a manufacturing renaissance—for restoring itself, and for the global economy as a whole. This will require major changes. Pisano and Shih show how company-level choices are key to the sustained success of industries and economies, and they provide business leaders with a framework for understanding the links between manufacturing and innovation that will enable them to make better outsourcing decisions. They also detail how government must change its support of basic and applied scientific research, and promote collaboration between business and academia. For executives, policymakers, academics, and innovators alike, Producing Prosperity provides the clearest and most compelling account yet of how the American economy lost its competitive edge—and how to get it back.

Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance

Producing Prosperity

This myth-busting book shows large companies can construct a strategy, system, and culture of innovation that creates sustained growth. Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano's remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation. He begins with the simply reality that bigger companies are, well, different. Demanding that they "be like Uber" is no more realistic than commanding your dog to speak French. Bigger companies are complex. They need to sustain revenue streams from existing businesses, and deal with Wall Street's demands. These organizations require a different set of management practices and approaches--a discipline focused on the strategies, systems and culture for taking their companies to the next level. Big can be beautiful, but it requires creative construction by leaders to avoid the creative destruction that is all-too-often the fate of too many.

Gary P. Pisano

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