Innovation and Management Policies — The Textile Machinery Industry: Influence of the Market on Management

Abstract

Many will think it strange that the textile machinery industry should have been chosen to point up a discussion of innovation, especially technological innovation. No industry in America has been more consistently singled out as an example of technological backwardness. About a decade ago the Honorable Henry Wallace, while on a lecture tour of New England, voiced the opinion that the American textile machinery industry was a hundred years behind the times. That Mr. Wallace based his statement on information so insubstantial as to be almost meaningless is of little importance. What is important is that all with eyes to see are likely to agree with him. Anyone who is familiar with the modern spinning frame and who, on visiting the Smithsonian Institute, chances to see on display there the spinning frame built by Samuel Slater in 1790 is inevitably struck by the similarity between the two machines.