It took a year from concept to hard-cover book, but The New Industrial Revolution is off to a good start. Just listed on Amazon, and with thousands of first-edition copies on their way to California, an order for 1,000 books has already been received. "I first talked about the book, last May, while I was in Taiwan, and the first order has just come from Taipei," said Benny Madsen, CEO of LitePoint Corporation, and the book's co-author.
Madsen's book, co-authored by Rob Brownstein, a LitePoint vice president, dissects the mechanisms by which today's consumer electronics companies are able to develop and market new products within months instead of years. What they found was more than a shift of manufacturing to countries with lower labor rates, but a paradigm shift in the very structure of companies and their value chains. "Before the first industrial revolution, we had the guild structure with independent individuals doing specific parts of a product or project. The Industrial Revolution pushed these disciplines under one factory roof, and the New Industrial Revolution has brought us back to independent entities, again," Madsen explained.
In consumer electronics, for example, it is common for IC makers to design and build the core component, another independent entity (the ODM) designs the device, yet a third (contract manufacturer) mass produces the product, and the brand-owning company handles marketing and customer relationships. Though the value chain becomes more complex, the efficiencies afforded by digitalization, the Internet, technology standards, and electronic-design automation supports the rapid coordinated development of high-quality products.
As Madsen and Brownstein researched the new paradigm they found that it was not confined to electronics. "We were seeing other industries beginning to steal a page from consumer electronics. For example, a group of automobile companies were collaborating in the development of a small set of standard six-cylinder engines that would be used in over 40 models of cars and trucks. It was a first step in standardization and economies of scale that would have a similar effect on automobile manufacture. We also saw similar moves toward standards and standardized components in construction," Madsen said.
The New Industrial Revolution (ISBN 10: 0-9797002-0-5) is available from Amazon and other book stores and online sources. It can also be purchased via LitePoint's Website at www.litepoint.com.
