Making Stuff
Monday, December 6, 2010 at 10:55AM
Edison2 in Edison2

Lynchburg, Virginia, is a place where you can get stuff made. A rich history of manufacturing – shoes, and then textiles – left Lynchburg with a machine tool industry that managed to hang on, even after the textile plants closed. This legacy has been crucial to Lynchburg’s ability to attract businesses such as Babcock and Wilcox, Areva, and, yes, Edison2.

Which is why we were pleased to read the business feature in the NY Times GE Goes With What It Knows: Making Stuff. It is not just that GE wants to return to its research and production roots after an ill-advised foray into the financial world, but that it understands just how crucial it is that our country have a robust ability to create and manufacture. “Technology based manufacturing of all sorts has to be a central part of reinvigorating the economy” asserts CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

This is exactly the message Oliver gave in his X Prize acceptance speech and why Oliver and several others on the Edison2 team carpool an hour each day to Lynchburg. Lynchburg simply has manufacturing resources that some communities, like Charlottesville, never really had and that many other communities had but lost. The importance of these resources was underscored by Oliver’s passionate impromptu introduction to his acceptance, acclaimed as  “one of the most compelling summaries of what we need to do to restore the American dream”.

Innovation is crucial to our future as a nation and cannot be outsourced. GE’s Jeffrey Immelt knows this and so does Edison2’s Oliver Kuttner. And hopefully so do a lot of other people. Our future depends on it.



Article originally appeared on Edison2 (http://edison2.com/).
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