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business newsHow Hog Manure, Not Financial Engineering Will Spur Economic Recovery
By
Justin Rohrlich
Oct 18, 2010 2:40 pm
America is the world leader in manufacturing ideas.
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A few years ago, The Atlantic Council and the Business Roundtable hosted an event called “The Sputnik Moment: Lessons for 21st Century Global Challenges.”
Frederick Kempe, president and CEO of The Atlantic Council, said, "The 1957 Sputnik launch was a call to action for U.S. science, education and global competitiveness. Fifty years later, we face an array of Sputnik-like challenges that will test us again - but without a Soviet satellite to awaken us.”
However, there have been plenty of other challenges to the United States in the absence of a Russian space launch. China’s increasing global dominance. India as the nation’s back office. Jobs lost to shareholder-pleasing “efficiencies”.
But, as a book by Gregg Easterbrook called “Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed” explains, “the big challenge today is to accept change -- perpetual, stressful, constant upheaval.” And it’s this constant upheaval that will spur the innovations which will lead us out of economic malaise and reenergize America.
For all the talk that America doesn’t manufacture anything anymore, it’s indisputable that we do -- we manufacture ideas.
The New York Post's Kyle Smith points out that 70% of goods and services sold in 2000 didn’t exist in 1900. In 2007, 85% of global economic growth came from new technology and innovation, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
He looks to Waltham, Massachusetts, a dead mill town outside Boston, where legacy companies no longer manufacture textiles, but new companies like Global Insight manufacture modern ideas, which, in Global Insight’s case, are then sold to companies like Walmart (WMT), which uses the firm as its primary marketing adviser.Then there's Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, which may be manufactured in China, but the idea behind it was manufactured in Cupertino, California.
What does this have to do with hog manure?
Missouri is the seventh-largest pork producer in America -- an honor that comes with an environmental issue, in the form of untreated manure stored in giant lagoons.
A “Sputnik Moment” at St. Louis firm Innoventor not only solved the problem, but created an entire industry around it.
With $1 million from the Environmental Protection Agency, Innoventor created a method for turning pig waste into asphalt.
No positions in stocks mentioned.
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