What is Exponential Industry?

The Exponential Industry newsletter covers the next wave of innovation within heavy industry, manufacturing, and supply chains as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0.

Free subscribers receive a weekly digest published at 9 am ET on Sundays. Subscribers will also receive periodic mid-week articles going deep on a particular manufacturing process, company, or industry trend.

If you are new to Exponential Industry you can view some of our most popular content at the links below:

• Designing an Automotive Assembly Production Line with ChatGPT: Project Commissioning

• Electrifying the World: A Look at the Top Battery Plants Across the Globe

• Uncovering Layoffs and Plant Closings in Manufacturers' WARN Notifications

• Explore the Global Lighthouse Network of Factories

• [Weekly Digest] Curiosity Will be the Driving Force of Manufacturing Innovation

Purpose

Exponential Industry seeks to be the highest quality mixed media newsletter for the business of high-tech manufacturing and supply chain. We seek to build a community across engineers, managers, and observers innovating within Industry 4.0 through weekly coverage of the latest in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), additive manufacturing (3D Printing), cyber-physical systems, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), robotics, and more!

Tenets

• Direct from the source - We bias to primary sources by synthesizing thousands of company blogs, press releases, podcasts, deep-dive articles, tweets, and videos directly from where they are originally published.

• Credit and attribution - We prominently display the author(s) and publication to give credit where credit is due.

• Straight to the point - Our excerpts seek to answer what and why. We want to highlight the value proposition and result so each reader is briefed on a wide range of topics and is encouraged to dive deeper if the content is enticing to explore more.

• Private and opt-in by default - We use Substack to help us deliver this publication directly to your inbox and thus we know your email. On our website, we use Cloudflare web analytics which provides traffic analytics without compromising user privacy. That’s it. This gives us enough insight to know which media you find valuable in aggregate and ensure our content continues to hit the mark.

Why ‘Exponential’ Industry?

For most of the last 50 years, US manufacturing productivity, the increase of production of goods with relatively fewer inputs, has increased at an exponential rate. This phenomenon is prominent throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the period is commonly referred to as the Third Industrial Revolution. It was marked by the adoption of transformative technologies such as general-purpose computers, microelectronics (PLCs, microcontrollers, etc.), telecommunications, and robotics that brought high-level automation to industry. Following the Global Financial Crisis in 2010, manufacturing productivity within the US has leveled off. The Bureau of Labor Statistics and many others have studied this great stagnation in comprehensive detail. The way forward is uncertain, but there is hope that many emerging technologies will return us to these exponential productivity gains that go back to the First Industrial Revolution starting in the late 1700s.

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