The COVID-19 global crisis continues to disrupt manufacturing and global supply chains with severe consequences for society, businesses, consumers and the global economy. This has raised new and unprecedented questions on the level of resilience of global value chains and the overall approach to manufacturing. The World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Kearney, brought together C-level executives from different industry sectors to identify best responses to the current COVID-19 crisis.
This MForesight report identifies fundamental weaknesses in U.S. manufacturing and the risks these weaknesses pose for long-term wealth and security. It emphasizes the need for concerted national action to rebuild and restore manufacturing skills, capabilities, and productive capacity. The problems have developed over decades but have become worse with time, now reaching the point where we have lost the ability to scale emerging technologies because of a weak industrial commons.