Watching the local news or reading the most recent reports on the state of manufacturing, one would wrongly assume heroes of innovation, such as The Wright Brothers, Robert Goddard, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs are just part of manufacturing history.  That somehow leaders and visionaries of manufacturing are things of the past. Yet clearing away the negative veil, there is an underlying beauty growing beneath.  Visionaries of today exist and are sharing their light through [...]

Dr. Robert Materna (2011) writes clearly about a national issue “With the U.S. government shutting down the shuttle program without a new vision for space – very little has been done to excite and educate the next generation about the opportunities in the industry and, as a result, there is little enthusiasm for entering the field. The good news is that there are some very good reasons to enter the field. The challenge is to help students shift [...]

In the last blog on clusters, we talked about the evolution of clusters and the benefits clusters can provide to a community and its many stakeholders. In this blog, the focus is on the leadership role of stakeholders in creating or growing sustainable aerospace clusters. For the purpose of this discussion, stakeholders include federal, state, and local government agencies; primes, OEMs, suppliers, and service providers; high schools, universities and other organizations as necessary. To be [...]

The more we practice, the more critical thinking becomes part of our natural thinking process. This is important, because we are normally wired to take shortcuts in an effort to conserve our energy, to survive, or just to move on. If our thought processes are normally intellectually lazy, can we expect to be able to turn on the critical and creative juices in a crunch?