- [Announcer] Production and distribution of City Club forums on ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.

(upbeat music) (bell ringing) - Hello and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, chief executive here, and a proud member.

Today's March 26th.

You're at the virtual City Club forum.

We're live from the studios of our public media partner, 90.3 WCPN ideastream, big thanks to them.

When you think about the future we wanna create for our communities, here in Greater Cleveland, across the state, across the country, for that matter, there's actually a fair bit of common ground.

I don't feel like I'm going out on a limb by saying we'd probably all like to see more people have access to more great jobs and to be able to learn the skills to succeed in those jobs.

The outcome of that would be increased economic opportunity and prosperity for more people, especially our neighbors who have experienced intergenerational poverty.

And with that actually pretty large patch of common ground in mind, we've been partnering with the Deaconess Foundation and Huntington Bank to put together some conversations about workforce development.

Last month, we talked about advancing racial equity in hiring and job training.

Two weeks ago, we imagined the impact of widespread access to high quality, affordable childcare, and early childhood education.

And today we'll explore where technology meets manufacturing as we contemplate what the factory of the future will look like and how if we do it right we might be able to solve some of the big problems around equity.

Lemme introduce our Friday forum speakers, Craig Platt is the managing director of the IT sector partnership at the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

He joined GCP four months ago after spending more than 30 years working for General Electric.

Dr. Elizabeth Reynolds is the executive director of the Industrial Performance Center and the task force on the work of the future at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She's been actively engaged in efforts to rebuild manufacturing capabilities across the United States.

Most recently, as a member of Massachusetts Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative and she has been named to a post in the White House and she will let us know if she can talk more about that.

Adam Snyder, is managing director of the manufacturing sector partnership at MAGNET.

MAGNET is the manufacturing, Advocacy and Growth Network here in Northeast Ohio.

And it's part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Ohio Manufacturing Extension Partnership to support small and medium manufacturers across the United States, but especially of course, here in Northeast Ohio.

As I said if you have questions about the factory of the future and the workforce of the future, text your questions to (330) 541-5794.

That number again is (330) 541-5794.

And you can also tweet them, @TheCityClub if you are a Twitter kind of person, we'll work them into the program.

Craig Platt, Liz Reynolds and Adam Snyder, welcome to the City Club of Cleveland.

- [Craig] Thank you.

- Wonderful to have all of you with us.

Liz Reynolds I did mention the appointment to the administration.

Are you, are you permitted to talk about that, to discuss at least what you're going to do?

- [Liz] I can certainly mention my title.

I start next week.

So I'm gonna be the special assistant to the president for manufacturing and economic development.

So very much engaged in the kinds of issues and topics we'll be discussing today.

- Excellent, Liz, I wanna start with you, as you're gonna kind of provide the larger and national and global perspective on our conversation.

Craig and Adam are gonna help us understand the local impact.

But it seems to me that there are sort of two broad areas that we're talking about.

Firstly, what does the work of the future actually look like?

And then secondly, how organizations and institutions in the broader economy should shift and evolve to make sure that as we're approaching this work of the future and this factory of the future, we're doing it in a way that actually creates shared prosperity.

And doesn't exacerbate problems of inequality that we faced and seem to have grown a lot in recent years.

Is that the right way to think about these set of issues?

- [Liz] I think so.

I think it's a great way to kick off this conversation.

And of course, MIT launched this task force on the work of the future in the spring of 2018 at a time when it felt like the country was, you know, besieged with this idea that the robots are coming, they're taking all our jobs.

You know, there'll be nothing for everyone and we'll have to create, you know, universal basic income because there won't be enough jobs.

And what we found in our research which involved actually a lot of interviews in in Ohio with companies there, etc, was that, you know what we know is that technology while it does replace existing work and has done that for decades, it also is creating new work.

And about over 60% of the jobs we have today did not exist in 1940.

It's very easy for us to look back and see what's been lost but what's hard for us to project what's going forward.

And so what we know is that automation has been introduced you know, for decades and in fact we've had more labor market participation over time over the 20th century.

And so our challenge, we think going forward is not gonna necessarily be the number of jobs certainly post COVID we're in a really challenging time right now but really the quality of jobs because while technology is changing rapidly, we've got AI and robotics everything's coming, I mean, really creating tremendous opportunities.

Those opportunities can only be realized across the board if we actually change our labor market institutions.

We've had rising productivity over the last decades in which if you were a four-year degree holder you saw a lot of those gains but if you were a typical worker in this country, someone without the four-year degree, someone who's not in a supervisory position, then there was very little gains to your own income.

We had stagnating wages.

And so that divergence which started about 40 years ago, I think is partly what's behind the anxiety about the future, fewer in the group who really hasn't seen a lot of shared prosperity.

Then you're worried about an innovation.

You're worried about that technology.

But in fact if we can change those institutions and innovate in that area while we're innovating in technology, we really see a pathway forward that can bring the benefits to everyone.

- Liz Reynolds is, she runs the Industrial Performance Center at MIT, and she's also a part of the task force on the work of the future, soon to be heading to the White House, the Biden administration, to advise the president on these issues that we're discussing today.

And Adam Snyder and Craig Platt, I wanna turn to you to ask this sort of question that Liz pointed to, that we're seeing new jobs emerge that didn't exist, you know, 40, 50, 60 years ago.

And in the IT sector, Craig Platt, it's sort of in some ways it might be obvious and self evident that these are new jobs because IT didn't really exist as a sector, 50 years ago.

But Adam Snyder first, in terms of manufacturing what are the new jobs that didn't exist that you're seeing emerge in the last 10 years and likely to emerge in the next?

- [Adam] Okay, I think there's been an accelerating progression and excitement to adopt technology, both in the process and around the process and manufacturing that have created a ton of opportunity for both incumbent workers and for people in the community that are learning about manufacturing as to where they can jump in.

And you see that with the refinement of process and the more advanced machining and processing and automation.

But now there's a growing interest with the manufacturers in Industry 4.0 and all of the talents and skills that are gonna be needed to have that materialize in data analytics and sensor technology.

And a bunch of intersections with high tech, fast moving, fast developing competencies that are gonna create opportunities for people through the entire work stream.

- Adam Snyder is the managing director of the manufacturing sector partnership at MAGNET.

Craig Platt runs the sector partnership for IT.

Craig, we should also define kind of what a sector partnership is, because it's a relatively new concept in workforce development trying to bring together industry and the folks responsible for actually doing training.

What are you training?

What are you seeing the big needs are for training in the IT sector right now?

And are we talking about super high skilled coding jobs that require a computer science degree or something else?

- [Craig] It's more than that.

To be successful, yes, you need the technology.

But you also are in business, right?

So your communication skills, time management skills, things that help you survive the day like emotional intelligence.

There's more than just the technology.

Most employers will tell you that it's easy to train on the technology, but then how do I grow?

How do I understand how to leverage that technology to improve a business?

So when you look at advancements in expertise it's not pure technology.

It's how you innovate and drive business value that extends out to the customers to create value that helps move careers along.

So it's just not coding.

And that's an easy thing to point to, project management is critical.

The speed of delivery is critical.

So you have agile scrum masters that instead of giving IT some investment money and you're taking a slower waterfall approach and you see somebody turn on that or a first implementation at 18 months, that's too slow.

The businesses are moving too fast.

So agile technology and that approach to implementing that way is also another set of job.

So it's just not coding language.

It's much more diverse and complex than that.

- I wanna dive into this notion and see if we can help paint a picture for our audience about what the factory of the future, what we imagine the factory of the future will look like.

Liz Reynolds, you had said earlier that AI did not displace workers and that we feared that the robots would be coming, and they didn't, they haven't quite arrived in the way that we thought and that they haven't displaced the logistics industry, we don't see a lot of autonomous or self-driving vehicles on the road or trucks on the road yet.

But what do we think, how just how automated will the factory of the future be?

I'll leave it there.

(both Liz and Dan laugh) - [Liz] So no doubt.

Look, we've had robotics.

- Liz, hold on a second.

If you could just unmute your microphone on the on the live stream, that'd be great.

Thank you.

- [Liz] Sure.

So, you know, Craig knows as well.

We've had industrial robotics in the automotive industry for decades.

I mean, automotive has been leading in that.

And so in some ways, you know, the robots that are coming are actually involved in things like collaborative robotics or trying to augment workers in different ways.

The AI is really about generating greater insight.

It's about quality.

It's about safety.

So it's transformative and it will change, it will change what people are doing.

And in many ways we are trying to, we see it replacing tasks, but not necessarily whole jobs.

There are very few jobs where the entire job can be replaced, particularly manufacturing.

And if it can be, frankly, it probably has been.

Like we've been through a lot of automation already.

So now it's about this technology, driving greater insight and creating more value on how do we augment workers.

And so when we think about the factory of the future, we kept asking a lot of the companies we met in Ohio, Michigan, (indistinct) what about this lights out factory, right?

We hear about that, and there's no question (indistinct).

- [Dan] What does that even mean?

- [Liz] Sorry, lights out factory, you can run it 24 seven without essentially humans.

You know, it can run with maybe one or two people kind of watching a few screens, but it's just constantly producing whatever widgets or pieces that you want.

The fact is, as one of the respondents said to us, I can't innovate in a lights out factory.

I cannot, you know, I don't have humans telling me how to do this better or what else we could change or how, you know, it's just not a model that works for anything that I think where the US has a lot of strength.

So the factory of the future is about connectivity.

It's about insight.

It's about customers, as Craig said, it's about, you know a digital thread that connects you from customer right through your supply chain.

It's a tremendous amount of opportunity to sort of really make a game changer in our manufacturing.

But what we found is, it's actually, as I said before, it's sort of, we're just at the first inning of that.

We're really at the beginning and firms are figuring this out.

You think Industry 4.0 has been around that language has been around.

We call that a suitcase term.

It's whatever you wanna throw in the suitcase is Industry 4.0, it's very hard to figure out exactly what that means.

- Well, I wanna come back to something to just a phrase that you use earlier, augmented workers.

And, you know like in my head, like, I started seeing, you know like a robotic exoskeletons and things like that.

I don't know, I have no idea what you're talking about when you say augmented workers.

So I mean, is just 'cause it sounds like potentially science fictiony or it sounds like really just an AI program that helps a worker make a decision.

- Yeah, so, you know, it's funny.

So I think that, you know artificial intelligence, unfortunately, it's here to stay but what a term, right?

We're not sure what that means either.

So what we're talking about is, technology that's just helping the worker and in the past it was just physical, right?

We could basically, a robot could come and help you lift something.

Now it's quite cognitive, it's helping you generate insight.

So think about every factory, you know, in Ohio ideally you'd have sensors all over the place that would tell you how many, you know what you're producing.

I mean, sort of the timing, what's gonna happen with your tools, are they in good shape?

Does it look like they're gonna wear down?

You know predictive maintenance pieces, all of this kind of generation.

And the challenge right now is we're generating more data than we know what to do with or how to interpret.

And so what we also heard from some of our interviews was, the machines are talking but we need people who know how to listen.

And that's our workers, right from the floor, you know from the factory floor, all the way to management.

And that's the transformation that's happening.

Everybody's got to figure out how to listen differently.

It's not just about putting new widgets in that corner of the factory, on that production line, you know, and we've got, you know, we need new skills there.

It's really about the entire organization.

- And then this really is then Craig Platt, where IT meets manufacturing, you can no longer just have a bunch of machines, you know, and workers operating those machines.

But the IT is completely integrated.

- [Craig] It absolutely is.

It's a collaboration.

And really, it's easy to say to us, look at the factory.

But for me to provide products to my customers that are quality products, what they want and when they want it, it's an end to end process, from taking the order through forecasting through inventory, it's just not that piece.

So when you think about this whole process you have to think about it from a role throughput yield, from beginning to end.

I could take one piece and optimize it and barely moved the needle on my customer service levels.

So an IT person needs to be able to look at the process end to end and understand where the greatest impact is.

So I could spend tons of money on my factory and I keep generating errors in order entry or my distribution logistics are off, or the forecast of materials.

So it's an end to end system that you need to model and then digitize.

So that's a collaboration, it's not write a 50 page, 100 page specification and get a brain dump of somebody.

Most of the time are you gonna do that?

You're gonna digitize exactly what they're doing today.

And there is no innovation.

So your incremental benefits, you can get an incremental benefit, not the full benefit.

- Adam Snyder, when you look at the manufacturers across Ohio and across the 20 plus County region that you work in, who's doing this best.

Who's got the factory of the most futuristic factory?

- [Adam] It's really an exciting time to look at that in particular because there are pockets of leaders that are leaning into this transformation, that are leaning into this technology adoption, and also at the same time looking at how that impacts their workforce.

And I think that the takeaway for me from some of the things that Liz said and from Craig said was that there's an excitement and an opportunity here where as technologies come into play even more heavily, and in particular the bigger companies that have seen this coming and have the resources to put teams of people on the strategies and the implementation of this, they're leading, and they're getting out there and there's an opportunity for their suppliers, the small and mid-size manufacturers to follow along and get pulled in the wake of that transformation.

And now everybody's starting to see some of the benefits that not only on the nuts and bolts things, profitability, delivery, uptime and things like that.

We're seeing, I think one of the things that I wanted to shine a light on that Liz said was, we're actually making the manufacturing environment and that factory of the future, a more enjoyable and productive and safe place for the people that are in it.

Because some of those automation technologies are helping create safer processes.

Robots exist most productively in a really clean factory.

So there's a momentum build there where the more we get into technology, the farther we get from the 80 year old vision of a dark dirty factory.

These are clean technology driven places.

And then from a people standpoint, 30 years ago it was the maintenance technician that knew to listen for a particular sound or put their hand on a machine and go, hmm, I bet that's that bearing that's going again.

And now we have, - [Dan] He was the sensor.

exactly.

And now that job isn't replaced that maintenance technician can be that much more effective because the sensor technology can say, before his hand could feel it, that bearing needs replaced.

He can do it proactively, all of the workers around that piece of equipment stay more productive.

So it's really a nice momentum build that we're going through now.

- Adam Snyder is managing director of the manufacturing sector partnership at MAGNET.

We're also talking with Craig Platt, managing director of the IT sector partnership, he's with Greater Cleveland Partnership and Liz Reynolds, Dr. Liz Reynolds, who is executive director of the Industrial Performance Center and the task force on the work of the future for MIT, also heading to the Biden administration to advise the President as a special assistant to the president on these issues.

I wanna broaden our conversation to the other, we've talked about the factory of the future and I wanna broaden our conversation to this other area that I pointed to, how organizations and institutions in the economy should shift in order to ensure that as we are evolving, you know as a set, as the manufacturing sector, the IT sector, that we're bringing workers along with the economic prosperity that comes with that.

Liz Reynolds, this is a huge topic of the work for the future report that you coauthored.

So how do we do that?

- [Liz] Well, you know, I think that clearly one of the pillars of the discussion today is around workforce training and education.

And how do we bring new skills to the current generation?

To Craig's point earlier, you know there's this really sobering data that if you are over 20 and I think everybody on this call is, if you're over 20, your skills, sadly, memory, speed of processing all of that just starts just like plummet.

It just keeps going all the way to 70, you know, - [Dan] I've noticed.

But yes, have you noticed?

What happens is your domain knowledge, a crystallized knowledge grows all the way to 70 and 80.

And so what we want is, you know in some ways these firms, what we heard (indistinct) we want the domain knowledge of the older workers, you know, the real skills they have, and the savvy of the younger workers and, you know creating technology that is worker friendly, worker centric.

That is again, augmenting workers.

We have this phrase from one of our economists, Daron Acemoglu and his, his colleague Pascual Restrepo which is, so-so technologies.

That a lot of firms have been trying to reduce their costs by just throwing some technology, get rid of an FTE.

And that, you know my productivity goes up, but that's not, building resiliency, doesn't build you long-term innovation productivity.

It's about trying to tap into the workers and building their capabilities.

And what we've seen is that actually firms are really you know, with all the online stuff, firms are really in a position to do this in a great way.

All the AR and VR, sorry, virtual reality Augmented reality Augmented reality and virtual reality and virtual reality is gonna be you know, we're at the beginning of that.

And so figuring out how to do that, and, you know, I've had a lot of interviews and meetings in Ohio, and a lot of people kind of thinking about that on the, you know, really on the frontier of how to bring that into our training.

I think there's a real way to do it.

What we're short of is actually long, you know getting demographics and longterm trends.

We're short of workers for manufacturing down the road.

And so that's part of the training that I know MAGNET's doing and others are involved in.

- I wanna talk about that in a second.

Liz Reynolds I know that we're trying to figure out a technology solution for you right now.

So I'm gonna direct the next couple of questions to Adam and Craig, to allow you some time to figure that out.

Adam, Liz just pointed to this, the issue that has been plaguing Northeast Ohio for as long as I've been here, which is that there's an abundance of unfilled jobs and an abundance of unemployed people.

And there's a skill, a complete skills mismatch or an inability to connect people to these jobs.

How are we solving that problem?

Are we moving the needle on that problem at all right now?

And how?

- [Adam] Yeah, there's some great opportunities.

There's a distinct reality to the fact that we have not done a good job, telling our story in manufacturing.

And part of the reason I jumped into this role and left running a manufacturing company and running plants, was because of this gap in the ability to have an impact on this.

And so the momentum and the gains that we're making right now in helping in particular younger folks and people who haven't been exposed to manufacturing see that vision of the factory of the future and get excited about it, I think is a real opportunity, we have to lean into it.

Employers are leaning into it through things like the sector partnership, Cleveland innovation project.

We've got partners in education and workforce that are starting to see those gains and are also learning and becoming advocates in the community.

And one of those transformations to me is that for years manufacturers, we have romanticized the idea that the backyard tinkerer or mechanic that loves playing under the hood of their car, easily rolls into manufacturing and they like to work with their hands.

And that's the person we're looking for.

And the reality of the jobs of the future is that that's not the complete skillset or the mindset.

So instead of trying to, for the last 10 years we've been trying to teach backyard mechanics how to program robots, we've now got an entire generation of folks that know the technology basics and grew up with touchscreens as infants that we could be say, hey, you can do these things and it's really cool.

And technology is exciting.

And also look at how amazing manufacturing is in converting this raw material into a finished good and find those folks that are inspired by that as much as we've been for the last couple of decades.

- I wanna just mention that if you have questions about the work of the future, the factory of the future and how we make a more equitable, how we use this as an opportunity to make more equitable future, please join our conversation with a text message to (330) 541-5794.

You can text your question there, (330) 541-5794, or you can tweet it, @TheCityClub.

We'll work it into the program.

We're coming up on the Q&A in just a minute.

But Craig Platt from the IT sector standpoint and also from your, you know, decades of work with GE, I mean, you must've seen this gap, this mismatch play out every day with unfilled jobs at GE.

- [Craig] Well, it's interesting in terms of where you put your focus and is it on an initiative that when you hit a skills gap you go fix it and then you move forward.

Then you hit a gap and you go fix it or do you spend the time building an ecosystem?

And that's what we're doing in our sector partnerships.

We're building a coordinated ecosystem.

There's a lot of great work going on in terms of workforce development in higher education.

But is it linked to in demand jobs, right?

Is it linked to why employers think great technical resources fail in an environment, right?

Is it conducive to the fit of how they work?

I work best in small groups, I'm in a large scale project.

Am I gonna be effective in it?

So the collaboration between the employers, higher education and also work force developers has gotta be tighter, right?

You can't (indistinct), you don't skate to where the park was or is right now, where's it going, right?

If you're thinking about AI, you're not gonna be great at AI immediately, right?

Because the (indistinct) is, you've got great data and secure data and quality in your data.

So when I have an individual that I wanted to be a great artificial intelligence development expert, you start somewhere, right?

And then to Adam's point.

The other thing I like to touch on, he talked about the backyard mechanics and working on automobiles and the father and the daughter or the father and the son doing that.

And it translates into work.

Well, digital technology has to be that same way.

The problem is everybody doesn't have tablets at home.

The pandemic showed us that the digital divide is bigger than anybody ever expected.

So you think about an educational system.

When we start to talk about you're gonna participate in classes virtually, but a family doesn't have the technology to connect.

You say, oh my gosh, we have to fix that.

But think about it.

They're still playing catch up because the other homes that have the digital technology, that have digital literacy, digital equity, when they're doing their homework, they're using the web.

They're doing simulations, they're doing modeling.

And there's another group of people working from a book.

So it's an end to end process.

Understanding from the employers, the jobs of the future, getting that communicated all the way down and understanding how you build those skills at an early age.

My four year old granddaughters have had tablets for three or four years.

They can go find the movie they want, three screens down, two down.

They are not nervous about the technology, And so, - [Dan] Not as nervous as you are.

Well.

(Craig and Dan laugh) - I'm giving you a hard time, Craig, I just try and jump in here.

I just wanted to, I just need to say right now, if you're just joining us, you're at the City Club, Friday forum.

We're talking about the future of work, the future of factories and how we can use this opportunity presented to us by the introduction of AI and other things that are drastically changing how work happens, how we can use all of this to create a more equitable future and more economic opportunity for more of our neighbors.

If you'd like to join the conversation with Craig Platt of the GCP, Adam Snyder of MAGNET and Liz Reynolds of MIT, and soon to be of the Biden administration, please text your question to (330) 541-5794.

The number again is (330) 541-5794.

You can also tweet it @TheCityClub and we'll work it into the program.

I'm gonna jump in with first couple of questions from our listeners that have come in.

It appears that workers and unions are fearing job loss caused by the adoption of an investment in technology.

Are manufacturers at all, trying to ease these fears and provide training opportunities for current workers?

Why or why not?

Adam Snyder.

- [Adam] Yeah, we are seeing an explosion of sorts and incumbent worker skill training.

And some of that is driven by our partners at the state and national level.

There's tons of conversations about how do we expand apprenticeship models.

Ohio has been running tech credit now out of the governor's office for.

- It appears as if we're having some internet issues.

It's that kind of a day here in Greater Cleveland.

And we're going to keep the conversation going a little bit.

If you have questions and you wanna join our conversation about the future of work and the future of manufacturing and how we can create a more equitable future here, please text your questions to (330) 541-5794.

That's (330) 541-5794.

And you can also tweet them @TheCityClub and we'll work them into the program.

And Liz Reynolds, are you still with us?

Can you hear me?

- [Liz] Yeah.

- Oh, wonderful, thank goodness.

Because otherwise I was gonna be vamping for the next like 10 minutes while the internet went out.

But lemme ask you about this, that question about what manufacturers and firms are actually doing, for many years, it has seemed from my standpoint as a total outsider to all of this, that they've been expecting that the K-12 system and the higher ed system and the community college system is gonna do the job of training for them.

So they could just hire the worker and there should just be a ready supply of workers.

And that hasn't worked out very well.

Are you finding that firms are leaning in and hiring people who they believe to be trainable and then investing in them?

- [Liz] Well, I think we could all say, again this is pre pandemic.

I think we were in a very different place, we have to say that.

But what we know is firms have decided that they need to lean in.

And we see that.

I think we've certainly seen that in a lot of the tech firms but we're also seeing it in our manufacturing firms.

I do think if you look at, you know, it's not new news to Ohio manufacturers that there's a shortage of workers, right?

This has been over a decade or so of knowing this.

What is new is the idea that actually firms have to be coordinating and working with the institution some of the ecosystem that Craig was talking about.

And that that's really where are we gonna see the greatest gains.

I mean, when we think about what's ahead and where we're gonna find those workers, we now have to start thinking about, well are we getting them from, you know, from high school right through, into training post-secondary education.

And what we know is that, you know, we have 40% of our population has a high school degree or lower.

That is not sufficient for the 21st century.

It's not gonna be enough.

We need people to be moving into education beyond in terms of certifications or two year degrees.

And we need employers to be part of that solution.

And so we have seen a lot of good, I think things coming out and Adam can talk about this better, but a lot of the larger firms are now are sort of have partnerships.

We have programs like IBM's, P-TECH programs, pathways to technology that are taking us from, taking students from high school, into training.

Work-based learning critical, work-based learning.

And then into a position, for example for cyber technology technicians.

It used to be to IBM hired only computer scientists, four-year degree computer scientists for that cyber technician.

And it turns out you don't need a four-year degree.

And, you know, by the way, we lose a lot of people on that four-year degree pathway and they spend a lot of money.

So let's create pathways to the middle that in which we're really investing in the partnership where you get the workplace learning, you get, you know what's interesting the Germans have now moved into this.

We now want some vocational training and we want some of that kind of theory foundational line.

And I think in the past, firms were sort of waiting for that person to just show up at their doorstep.

And now they understand that they have to be part of the solution.

- Adam Snyder, are you seeing that here in Northeast Ohio that firms are behaving as if they see themselves as part of the solution and working on those pathways?

- [Adam] (indistinct) the sector partnership model is a great example of employer lead, employer engaged, employer owned initiatives.

And as a collaborative, we're seeing things happen in the ecosystem that haven't happened before because the partners know that the demand is there and that the voice of demand is setting some of the priorities.

And I think on the other side of that, for years we can now shine a light on the fact that manufacturing has been resilient and innovative, somewhat inside four walls for a long time.

Many companies have developed training programs internally, many more than are engaging with our community college system, many more than are engaging with the workforce system historically.

So now to bring some of those things out into the open and look at where synergies across 10 companies, where are there common skill sets where we can incorporate different earn and learn models across many companies, just creates that much more visibility to the community and that much more access for all the partners that can help bring people into those programs.

- Another question from the community, where are we with respect to competition in the strength, global competition and the strength of China and their progress on these very same issues as well, and Europe for that matter?

Liz Reynolds is kind of your wheelhouse.

- [Liz] Well, I think it's fair to say that, you know the country has been awakened to international competition and a sense that we need to make a significant investment so that we can compete internationally in many of these technologies and these sort of emerging industries where we have a lot of competitive advantage.

And that is grounded in advanced manufacturing in many ways.

AI is sort of a foundational piece of it, but it's robotics, it's bio manufacturing, it's clean energy.

And these are areas that are growth areas where we have real strengths.

And so I think that we, you know, our report shows that we've actually had a decline in public R&D dollars over the decades.

We've had total R&D dollars have been strong and been consistent with private money but the public side has declined.

And so I think, I think the Biden administration has made clear that they're really have a large vision for a robust R&D agenda.

And so I think that will be part of what is going forward.

But we do have a lot of emerging strengths here.

And I personally am one who believes that that's the future for us.

It's not about bringing back what was, you know, went off shore decades ago.

It's gotta be about how we're building it going forward.

- Liz Reynolds is the executive director of the Industrial Performance Center and also with the task force on the work of the future, both at MIT, she's heading to the Biden administration to advise the president on these issues.

Adam Snyder of MAGNET is with us along with Craig Platt of the Greater Cleveland Partnership.

And Craig runs the IT sector partnership.

Craig in terms of IT, that would seem to be an area where you know, in terms of IT in this issue of global competition and competition with China, that would seem to be an area of great concern for local firms.

What are you hearing from the members of the sector partnership?

- [Craig] Well, what's interesting is, IT has been global for a long period of time.

And the reality is, employers have tapped into that technology.

Businesses with global footprints, meaning having factories and customers that have naturally built up employees in those countries where the development and the preparation may be a little bit more ahead of where we are, here.

So in terms of employer in IT, you know, working virtually and having a global team that can collaborate and build solutions has been easy, as long as the network has been there.

The thing that we have to remember is, a lot of innovation occurs when you're actually walking through a factory and you're looking and you're questioning how it's laid out how it's operating, why is somebody doing this?

So when we don't have that out there, we lose out a little bit here too.

So I agree with Liz and Adam.

When you build back here, it's different.

It's not just bringing it back to the states or back to your community.

Well, what are you gonna do differently?

How are you gonna build your organization that your organization is based on continuous learning?

It's based on understanding that digital technology is your friend.

And in particularly in the manufacturing the other piece is operational technology and information technology.

Operational technology runs the machines as generating just tons of data, but if I'm on the outside, I'm just IT.

And I'm looking at that.

I haven't tapped into that data.

So that factory is another source of innovation.

So when we build here differently, we have to build with the integration that this particular machine doing this particular job is part of the system.

And we need to get the data out of it.

That's when you start to build a foundation where you get machine learning, artificial intelligence from the ground up, you can't just add that on top of what you have.

- Another question for all of you, why are capital dollars, pardon me, why are capital dollars intimidated by investing in a region such as Cleveland, that could be fertile ground for growth, with talent and resource capacity?

And I'm really interested to hear kind of from each of you about this.

We're a state with flat population, the very little population growth, certainly with respect to the rest of the country.

And this challenge of attracting new businesses and business expansion is one that, both of you, Craig and Adam have colleagues in the, you know, of colleagues at MAGNET and at GCP, and at other organizations who've been working doggedly on this for years, and we still seem to struggle.

What's going on?

- [Craig] I think we're on a journey.

I don't think it's this steep decline.

I think we are working on what makes us a better environment, from the infrastructure to allow workers to get to their jobs, to the ideas of we have to tap in to our diverse populations.

When you look at Cleveland or Cuyahoga County and African-Americans make up 30% of the population, only 9.5% are working in IT, it's telling you you're missing out.

When we tap into those local resources, when we convince our students that are going to local colleges but only 47% stay home in businesses, when we show them that the community is going to invest in them, early, so they realize the rich resources that are in Cleveland.

So I think Cleveland is a great place to be.

I've built my 40 career here.

And while in Cleveland, I've seen the world, from Cleveland and traveled everywhere through a great corporation.

So we have a lot of great corporations.

We have to make sure that people understand the opportunities in those corporations, that IT careers can take them through all of these things.

But again, we have to solve some of our local issues in terms of tapping in to a population that's 30% but represents 9.5% of the IT workforce.

- Liz Reynolds is this question often touches on the use of economic incentives, tax incentives and so forth that are put together as packages for potential, for employers and others is in particular when there's a large scale manufacturing site to be selected.

What does your research tell you about how much that's driving growth in these sectors?

- [Liz] Well, I think there is a place, there always has been a place for some incentive, but frankly, you know the real growth comes from what we call endogenous growth, from finding the assets and putting them together a certain way within the region.

So that is just, as Craig said it's the talent, it's the universities, it's the businesses and generating new growth, generating entrepreneurial opportunities from that.

So, you know, it's often a race to the bottom through a lot of the tax, you know, the tax play.

And so I think, you know we have examples where there's also said, you know what, that's not how we're gonna compete.

We're gonna build our capabilities in X.

And, you know, we can find examples.

Lemme just put out on the capital side.

This is some research we did at MIT a few years ago.

And it just speaking more broadly, I think, nationally but also to hardware to the companies that are making things.

Making things takes longer than setting up an app to buy something over the internet, right?

So the kind of consumer facing software-based startups, you know, they can scale in a minute, they've got kind of, you know, zero marginal costs over a period of time and they can raise money quickly and they can help get that risk capital, if you're a (indistinct) and you wanna be out in seven or eight years after your investment, some of that works.

When we're making something, which we do in Ohio, we should do elsewhere.

That's just not how it works.

It takes much longer.

And so I think what we found in some of our research is that when we have startups, really strong startups that are making things, we have a very strong ecosystem at the startup phase.

They can find the capital, they can find, you know, initial investors but when you have to find capital for over 10 years, when you're doing something that takes longer, when it takes us, a longer runway you need more capital, you know, you're still learning what we call learning by building.

We actually have a challenge, I think in the country with this kind of startup ecosystem.

And I think that that's something that, again, across the country, you know we could look for ways to serve address that so that the startup opportunities in Ohio that are manufacturing-based have access to capital to help build those companies.

- Adam Snyder.

- [Adam] I would agree with both of those things.

I see to Craig's point, there's a real parallel in my mind, around the perception of manufacturing and (indistinct) and the coverage that plant closures get versus the coverage that a startup gets when it hits 20 employees, that's not, you know there isn't a region wide party but a new product-based company getting to 20 employees or 50 employees, that is a huge task to go to that level.

And so I think there, we're seeing some acknowledgements and some progress in that, just in the last couple of weeks third frontier announced some awards that are really product centric, capital seed money, through jumpstart, through MAGNET, etc.

And we're starting to see an acknowledgement also by the manufacturing industry itself of both entrepreneurial support for startups that can support our broader OEMs and tier one manufacturers but also entrepreneurial activities where companies that are finding things and could do spinoffs when new product launches.

That there's an energy that's created by that.

That is both a source of pride for local manufacturing but it also presents a great future for job growth with such an amazing base of manufacturing that's been in Northeast Ohio for a hundred plus years.

There's also that opportunity to leverage that experience in the capital base of some of those companies as well.

- Is there an example of a manufacturer who has built "a factory of the future" and has found success both operationally and with their workers in terms of of creating new models for the work to happen?

And if so, where is it?

What can we learn from them?

And can we get them to open their next facility here in Northeast, Ohio?

Liz Reynolds?

- [Craig] Well I can give you - Oh, go ahead, Craig example of what I worked on and unfortunately, it's not in Ohio example but it could have been.

You know, it's interesting when the government creates regulations that puts your products at end of life.

And that's what happened in the lighting industry, no more incandescent bulbs.

The guys probably only remember those now.

But we had to change over a factory from incandescent products to new LED lighting.

LED lights have circuit boards, technology embedded in them.

And here's the existing workforce.

We had to partner with that workforce, change how the product was assembled, change the technology that was driving it, change how the workers interacted.

We put in touch screens to help them.

We spent time looking and observing their work.

What happened was, we had a business that was service lead times were four to six weeks and then the service levels were 60%.

So we're delivering your product four to six weeks.

Yeah, maybe about 60% of the time.

In the collaboration end to end working with the workers.

We changed that to the lead time, became 10 days.

The service levels went to 95% plus, the employment in the factory increased because we were winning as a business.

That's the key.

You all have to be bought in, the good of the business serving quality products when the customers need them in the configuration that drives customer outcomes.

That partnership became a factory of the future, healthcare providers, large construction, equipment manufacturers, came to see that transformation.

Oh, we reduced inventory by 17 million too.

So there's cash.

- Oh, by the way.

There's cash.

And then we started replicating that model.

- Adam Snyder you're trying to get in.

- [Adam] Yeah, I appreciate the openness of where can we see a lighthouse example of this around the world, but there, it's a source of pride for me to talk about Parker Hannifin and (indistinct) and Lincoln Electric and M7 Technologies.

And some of the local companies that have leaned into this hard and are doing world-class things in technology adoption and integration with their workforce into this process.

And part of our responsibility at MAGNET and within the sector partnership is to get that word out and help put a spotlight on these lighthouse activities so that more manufacturers can reduce their anxiety or even their risk around adoption.

And see the benefit, start to project the benefit specific to their piece of the value chain and which technologies and how implementing them will benefit their workforce as well as their bottom line.

- Liz Reynolds, I wanna ask you to sort of pull back to the kind of economic perspective on some of this, the way that we're discussing this today about investing in workforce, investing in training, investing in skills, runs counter to the tendency that we've seen in what I'll sort of called in shorthand, shareholder capitalism, towards more of a stakeholder capitalism kind of point of view, that this human capital is also a really important piece of the equation.

Are you seeing that from your broad kind of 20,000 foot perspective, are you seeing that shift happening like for real or is it just kind of myth-making right now?

- [Liz] Yeah.

You know, first and foremost, I think there has been a shift in the language of firms and the way they're seeing this.

I mean, if you look across the board about what some firms are doing to raise wages, you know, to respond to some of the tensions we've seen with workers, I think it's real.

And then you have the business round table just a couple summers ago, you know the organization representing 200 CEOs of our largest companies in the country, saying we need to shift from the shareholder capitalism model, which has emphasized or has prioritized the shareholder as the most important stakeholder in the company to the stakeholder capitalism where you involve workers, you involve customers, you involve suppliers, all are part of the agenda.

So I think that there is a, I think there's a mind shift in that direction.

I think in terms of actual steps, you know I think we could point out to a number of things.

You know, Amazon has gotten a lot of heat for a number of, you know for a lot of their practices and yet they, you know raise their minimum wage of 15, Walmart also in a place that had challenges now, you know trying to find career pathways forward.

So I think there are shifts and I think what we understand and certainly what we've made very clear in our report is as I said at the beginning, that, yes, we need to do education and training, but that's actually not enough, it's necessary, but not sufficient.

We also have to improve the quality of jobs in this country.

We have some of the worst paying low wage jobs in the industrialized world.

If you have a low wage job in America, the same job in Canada is gonna pay a third more and give you healthcare benefits.

We just have to find a way to raise, you know the bottom and then provide opportunities for that you know, that pathway forward.

And I think that's part of this shift as well away from the shareholder to a stakeholder view.

- Adam Snyder, do the firms that you work with in the network, do they talk about it in this way?

Or are they're still concerned with the cheapest labor available?

- [Adam] The dire state of the workforce and the ecosystem and labor force right now, has pushed a lot of that thinking.

And my observation is that the Amazon's and the Walmart's pushing that wage up has created pressure on manufacturers to figure that out because they'll see people leaving for 50 cents more, down the street.

But I also think that there's a community mindedness that rides along with all of those employers, at least with the ones that are engaged with us, that they're proud of the fact that once they figure it out, there's mechanics there and how do our P&L rebalance in the right way.

And how do we make sure that the sustainability of our is healthy and also do this.

And what I think we're seeing right now is that we've put the pressure, the ecosystem has put the pressure on wage increases at the entry level, and then subsequently the compression but then there's also a reinvestment cycle.

And the same way we talked about capital cycle, increasing those wages, getting the return on investment, seeing the retention gains, seeing the productivity gains from from job quality that we know are there, that we we have faith will come, then allows that cycle to keep going as returns come investments, get made.

Those investments can get made back to the exact places we're talking about.

- Well, we are getting close to the end here and I wanna thank all of you for your participation today.

I recognize to enlisting to the three of you discuss this.

And in particular, on this last point that we're missing a voice here.

We're missing organized labor that has often played a role in setting up apprenticeship programs, at least in the trades, and has played an important role in determining or fighting for job quality.

There's a phrase that you just used.

And so clearly we've got more conversation to have on these issues, but really Craig Platt of the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Adam Snyder of MAGNET, Liz Reynolds, soon to be of the Biden administration.

Congratulations again, on your appointment.

We look forward to hearing great news on this, from the Biden administration and maybe having you back to discuss it some more.

- [Liz] Thank you Dan.

- Thank you all very much for being a part of this today.

- [Adam] Thank you.

- And thank you as well for joining us here on 90.3 WCPN.

We've had a great conversation about the intersection of technology and manufacturing and the future of workforce development and creating a more equitable future.

Again, Craig Platt is a managing director of the IT sector partnership at the Greater Cleveland Partnership, Dr. Elizabeth Reynolds is executive director of the Industrial Performance Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Adam Snyder runs the manufacturing sector partnership at MAGNET.

Thanks also to members, friends, sponsors, and donors and others who support our mission to create conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

We have two such conversations coming up next week, on Tuesday, we'll talk with national and regional educators about what learning loss is and what school districts are doing to mitigate it, a particularly important topic this year.

And next Friday, we'll talk with political strategists about the future of the Democratic Party.

You can find out more and see what else is coming up @cityclub.org and you can check out what you missed there, also on PBS Passport, Roku, Amazon Fire Stick, Vimeo, and of course our YouTube channel.

I'm Dan Moulthrop, stay close in your hearts my friends, it won't be long before we can be close in person, again.

Our forum is now adjourned.

(bell ringing) (upbeat music) - [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

(upbeat music) - Production and distribution of City Club forums on ideastream are made possible by the generous support of PNC and the United Black Fund of Greater Cleveland Incorporated.