“The loss has fired a debate over whether the future of Dresden, in what was once East Germany, should lie more in research and design, rather than manufacturing…
“We need to put money in places that create knowledge, not things,” said Wolfram Drescher, one of two co-chief executives at the company. “If all we had were production and not knowledge, I’d be standing on the street, unemployed.”
The thought that traditional manufacturing should not necessarily be the indispensable foundation of the economy is heresy in Germany. But as China moves to supplant Germany as the world’s largest exporter of goods, the questions here over where to invest for the future go to the heart of an issue that Americans have faced for decades but that Germans are just beginning to confront.”
- Carter Dougherty, “A Nascent Debate in Germany - Research or Manufacturing (NYT)”
