Leadership Quote by John Engler

“Nearly 60 percent” is the kind of statistic that sounds neutral while doing loud political work. Engler, a governor-turned-industry advocate type, is invoking manufacturers as the quiet engine of American innovation: not the romantic startup founder, not the federal lab coat, but the factory floor with an R&D budget. The number is calibrated to reassign cultural credit. If most industrial research happens inside manufacturing firms, then manufacturing isn’t the sunset industry pundits keep writing eulogies for; it’s the pipeline through which new materials, processes, and products actually get made.

The intent is practical and persuasive: justify policy. Once you establish manufacturers as the majority investor in industrial R&D, the next step is implied rather than stated: tax incentives, looser regulation, workforce training, infrastructure spending, reshoring rhetoric. The subtext is a defensive brief against two competing stories: that innovation lives mainly in Silicon Valley and universities, and that America can safely “move up the value chain” while letting production drift offshore. Engler’s figure argues those are the same mistake, because R&D and production are entangled. When manufacturing shrinks, experimentation, prototyping, and incremental process innovation shrink with it.

Context matters: post-NAFTA anxieties, globalization’s winners-and-losers math, and the bipartisan habit of talking about “innovation” while ignoring the unglamorous institutions that fund it. The statistic functions as a lever: it turns manufacturing from a nostalgia project into an innovation strategy, and it politely demands that lawmakers treat industrial capacity as something you build, not something you mourn.