Hi. I’m Mary Kaye Denning. Thank you for coming today. I’m delighted to be here with you and, more so, because this gathering --a cross pollination of inventors, process people and manufacturers-- is symbolic of how we can create opportunity for ourselves, by creating orders for American manufacturing.   

To give you a little background about me, I moved to Cleveland in the fall of 2006. 

I grew up in rural North Carolina. After graduation from UNC, I moved to New York City for a six-month internship. It worked out, I stayed thirty years. In the course of my career: I’ve been a student, a researcher, a designer, an inventor, a manufacturer, a marketer, a retailer and an entrepreneur. 

Looking back, I’ve been successful; and more than once, I’ve had to dust myself off and start again. 

I’ve made money; I’ve lost money. I’ve tied my well-being to my dreams. All of these personal experiences lead me to see -- for those of us in the innovation industry -- a better-way-to-market for ideas. 

I’ll explain more as we go along. 

Everyday, someone asks me, so why Cleveland? Well, folks, Cleveland is like living in Disneyland for a garage inventor, like me. 

I’ve learned the hard way: an idea goes nowhere without process people. And Cleveland is a land of opportunity. 

I was looking for a manufacturing culture--hard-working people with community-based values, a ready and able community of support services, and a high concentration of contract manufacturers with excess capacity to sell. I’ve found it here. 

Let’s face it, contract manufacturing has had either bad press or no press, which results in many unenlightened people saying that innovation and American manufacturing are withering on the vine. But I argue, they are dead wrong. 

Today, with this conference. my vision of organizing a community that assembles innovation comes to life. 

In our community, there are inventors, innovators, process people and manufacturers, appropriately aligned with on the ground economic development leaders. You know, a community much like our audience today. I believe it is this mindset — a supply chain for the American inventor — that can refuel the American dream. 

So, where do we start? 

 
First, we must correct the disadvantage that independent innovators must overcome relative to big business. Independent inventors for the most part, don’t have a process, and consequently, they don’t have a relationship with the service people who they need to get the product development job done. Having spent a career working in New York designing consumer products and making them production-ready, I have come to realize that new product-development tools and resources are skewed to favor enterprise-based businesses, that is, companies organized by task, a way of streamlining and processing innovation. 

Getting new products to market is an overwhelming task for the independent inventor. But it is much less so for big business.  

They have people on staff to assign to projects — .they have idea people, research and development people, product design people, engineers, production people, attorneys, and marketing people. 

Simply put, big business is prepared to cover the bases from start to finish. While the inventors and many contract manufacturers, who became accustomed to branded manufacturers doing those jobs, have none of these advantages. 

And so my move to Northeast Ohio, to be on the front lines of a manufacturing community looking for orders, was my first step in doing so. 

Today is the day our revolution begins. I invite each of you to join in and become a part of the renaissance in contract manufacturing. Together, let’s Re-invent, “Made in USA”. 

Innovation is a part of the American culture, just like apple pie and ice cream. We’re a nation of immigrants. Many of these immigrants came in pursuit of a dream that couldn’t be attained in their native countries, because of class or another barrier. Once in America, they found opportunity to apply practical solutions to problems they faced. These practical solutions improved our way of life. 

Their inspiration came from daily experiences. The innovation that followed became the democratizing factor that enabled the average American to benefit from the luxuries and lifestyles once reserved for the socially elite. 

Think about it... every industry in America began with one person’s bright new idea, or someone’s persistence at refining it. Just think, right here in Cleveland, industrial giant John D. Rockefeller exercised his vision of how to refine and retail gasoline. Another native of Ohio, Thomas Edison, didn’t invent the original light bulb; but he did perfect a 50-year old idea with a process improvement, the incandescent light bulb. 

George Westinghouse wasn’t the first to bring electricity to a city; Edison did that in New York. 

But, Westinghouse did improve upon Edison’s work and introduced alternating current which made it possible to transmit power over long distances. 

Several people from Ohio, including Scottish immigrant and Clevelander Alexander Winton, made cars; but, it was Henry Ford who introduced the transforming process of demand, the assembly line, making every citizen a customer. 

Silicon Valley; and all that it connotes, began in 1938 with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard inventing and manufacturing electronic equipment in their garage at 367 Addison Street in Palo Alto, CA. The garage and the company still exist. 

So what does this history lesson tell us? 

--There is no industry that can survive without innovation. 

--Products don’t mysteriously make their way to market. 

--Innovation goes nowhere without research, engineering, marketing and a whole lot more. 

--Without a new product development mindset, there can be no trading. No way to make a profit. 

But, if we cultivate inventors and give them access to the resources they need to bring ideas to market, orders will result. 

It’s now 2008, and we suffer from excess manufacturing capacity, idle machines, laid-off workers, an inability to connect with like-minded process people, low to no visibility of our factories and a low pulse on consumer demand — all because we’ve been waiting on someone else” to do the job for us. 

It’s time to stop waiting. Together, let’s re­invent, “Made in USA”.  

We know that the spirit of innovation resides in the soul of America. Those independent inventors bring solutions that solve problems and feed the food chain along the way. And, that many of these new ideas breed jobs and even kick start industries. So, you can believe that re-inventing Made in USA starts by connecting people in contract manufacturing to innovators who can create orders. 

What happened to American innovation?  

Let’s look at this timeline and find the answer. 

We’re in the 1890’s...Thomas Edison, the father of the US Census Bureau, identifies the profession ‘inventor’ as a job classification. Think Robert Fulton. Alexander Graham Bell. 

Let’s now move forward and look to the moment after the Great Depression started. 

Capital dries up pushing out-of-work independent inventors into working for corporate America in order to feed their families. Research labs, universities and the US government now own the bulk of their output.   

Moving forward, the decade of the 40’s put us at war. During that time, the US Census Bureau removed the job classification of ‘inventor’ from its data collection. 

So, in relative terms, with the stroke of an administrator’s pen, Thomas Edison is unemployed. Just think about that. And at the end of that decade, the manufacturing sector — the first service industry of all times— is reclassified as a “consumable” by the Census Bureau, putting it in the same category as fish. 

This re-classification, in our opinion, drove manufacturing away from its core competency, jeopardizing the very essence of its existence — a warranted privilege:  being in service to its customer. 

The decade of the 50’s, with the war over, led off with Wall Street increasing pressure on manufacturers to deliver higher returns on their capital, encouraging the industry to find lower labor costs. 

The 60’s, a time of striking contrast, Corporate America goes vertical causing manufacturing to lose further touch with its customer. Inventors, unable to survive independently, get a fancy education and don a three-piece suit or lab coat. 

The 80’s, Globalization becomes a manufacturing strategy to deliver higher returns on capital. Outsourcing, especially to Asia, influences design leading to mass production of more-of-the-same, just cheaper. 

The 90’s... 

Wal-Mart ushers in unprecedented retail discounting. Merchandisers insist cheaper keeps the registers ringing. Contract manufacturers start to see red and the bleeding can’t be stopped. It becomes apparent that the American contract manufacturer is left holding the bag. Today, popular opinion says “imports conquer all.” Contract manufacturers are scrambling to figure out, ‘how are we going to make money now?” 

Compared with the past, what happened? The short answer is we lost the connection between the vital people — the innovators, the new product development people, contract manufacturers, and the workforce. 

So, how did this happen? 

It’s not a simple answer. It was a combination of factors including technology providing different ways to do business. This started whittling down the people­ factor in business. We didn’t have any idea of what we lost until we felt the pain of an economy with fewer things to make here at home. 

But when innovation succeeds, contract manufacturers fill orders. The task of our non-profit, GaragelnventorLive.org, is to cultivate inventors so they can connect with new product developers. This is the quickest way to create new factory orders. 

Garage Inventors are the voice of the American consumer. They sense, feel and see opportunity. In response, they come up with practical solutions that make life easier. 

And businesses grow. By empowering inventors with a manufacturing language and by giving them access to better tools, they will build opportunity for themselves which will put more business into the pipeline. 

When we open the playing field to everyone 

— a scientist, a stay-at-home morn, an engineer, a retiree, a nurse, a painter, we have the catalyst we’ve been looking for. This opportunity will give everyone a chance to prove their ideas’ worth. 

GaragelnventorLive.org will be the place to get started and make your connections. It’s the place where every inventor will have the opportunity to link up with process people and build a supply chain. This transforming approach to innovation will give inventors a way to trust in the organized process of getting-to-market. Gaining confidence in their skills allows them to return their attention to what they love to do, inventing. 

By following a course of action with clearly defined deliverables, the inventor is empowered to connect with people who can test a concept, engineer it, run it through the gauntlet of marketing hurdles — and turn his idea into a commercially viable solution. With a marketing plan in hand, the independent inventor is ready for a presentation to a manufacturer, an investor, or an entrepreneur. 

Think about the way our economy works. 

What is the business of manufacturing? The global answer is to build the economy. To get a perspective on this statement, think China. Now, within that context, what is the economic role of the inventor, and every other workforce participant? Well, if you’ve never thought about it, their role is to create new jobs. So, if we work together, we can re-fuel the American dream by building a stronger economy and more new jobs. This will place a new foundation under our transitioning economy, starting right here in Northeast Ohio. 

Independent inventors sometimes don’t understand the value of process and often lack the business skills needed to communicate. GaragelnventorLive.org, when operational, will provide a platform where they can get started and move forward in a progressive manner by using the Garage Inventor’s Supply Chain™. 

There are hurdles to overcome. Production-ready can be equated to the Holy Grail. But with sequencing the tasks and bringing the right process people online when needed, we can reduce the time to market and the expense of doing so. 

It’s been well proven that supply chain management eliminates wasted energy and the misuse of both human and financial resources. We know that for a supply chain to work, every provider is dependent on the subsequent link partner. 

Try to skip a step and the process locks up like a computer with insufficient memory. Now ask yourself, how many times has doing things out-of-order killed a good deal? 

GaragelnventorLive.org will be the place for inventors to build their supply chain. It’s going to be a place for providers to list their core competencies for-hire, to match and interact with other process people. 

Contract manufacturers, once dependent on others to bring orders, will now be empowered to build the relationships they need and develop the products they need to grow. We have to be proactive and adopt a new mindset. If contract manufacturing is ever going to get back in the game, there’s no better way than by linking production with an investment-worthy inventor. I’ll say it again; garage inventors are the voice of the consumer. We must cultivate their services. 

They see problems and create solutions. If we do this, we put a face on American manufacturing again. 

GaragelnventorLive.org will be the Capital of Know-how™—the Garage Inventor’s new product development platform and the headquarters of America’s manufacturing process people. 

It’s already under construction. And if you go to GaragelnventorLive.org, you’ll see the outline of our vision, a hint of what’s to come. 

© 2008 - 2009 Mary Kaye Denning GarageInventorlIve.org