Appalachian Manufacturing Initiative

Dr. David Moran is President of Appalachian Initiative, Inc., and retired President of the National Technology Transfer Center; Director of Industrial Advanced Development & Industrial Outreach, Office of Naval Research; Program Element Administrator for Nuclear Propulsion, R&D, Naval Material Command; Director, David Taylor Institute; Assistant Technical Director, Director of Research, and Technology Director, Naval Research Center; U.S. Naval Academy, Full Professor, Navy Chair; West Virginia University; George Washington University.

Education: Ph.D. in Hydrodynamics & Mathematics, IIHR; SM., M.I.T, Ocean Engineering, Hydrodynamics; SB., M.I.T.; Harvard University; University Iowa; Graduate, Federal Executive Institute; Harvard University’s JFK School, Senior Official National Security. He is a member of the Boards of: Institute on Science for Global Policy; Tucker Community Foundation; Community Trust Foundation; Preston Community Fund; Past-Treasurer, Board of Directors, Maryland Garrett College. Publications: 102 Scientific Papers; 12 Patents, Hydrodynamics and Aerodynamics; two published Books; Past-Publisher of “American Scientist” and “Chronicle New Researcher.”

The impact opportunity is a new paradigm for a distributed manufacturing industry for Appalachia and motivated for participating individuals, families and communities. The program consists of a non-profit industrial Facilitation Service Source that provides all industrial service bases for small, local individual or family owned 3D printing profit-making producers financed by nominal percentage on profits.

Facilitation services include: Market need assessments; Education and training; Product development capabilities; Software; Design services; Supply chain requirements; Procurement and delivery; Product quality assurance; Marketing; Sales promotion; Advertising; Distribution; Tariff and tax assessment and monitoring; Financial monitoring and support services tailored to each producer’s needs. Non-Profit administrative costs are borne through percentage commissions on individual profits.

Local for-profit Producers employing three dimensional printing technologies and other appropriate services are individually responsible for meeting requirements and schedules established by the Facilitation and are self- or group-employed for individual income and profit.

The specific problem is empowering individuals to build income without being hired laborers to provide an income to lower skilled individuals through the application of proven technology.               

This theory of change arises from the intersection of Motivation – Technology – Services, as outlined in the following Venn Diagram:

                                     MOTIVATION
                                     EDUCATION
 

PROVEN TECHNOLOGY                                  BUSINESS SERVICES                                                        EASY IMPLEMENTATION                                   CAPITAL FINANCING 

Historical conventional manufacturing relies upon the exploitation of labor for profit-making companies. Centralization produces an inequitable distribution of wealth and increased universal poverty. The future standard of living for remote communities requires a new paradigm for the production of goods while simultaneously providing access to that industry through distributed local manufacturing using proven technological capabilities, communications and distribution systems.

The plan therefore employs existing technology and simultaneous social motivation and organization to level the playing field for new entries into capitalistic endeavor, provides the liberties of self-sufficiency and spontaneous collaboration and cooperation of participants, and provides freedom from bureaucracy by ensuring that all participants are responsible for meeting the requirements of consumer supply and demand.

The project creates a non-profit Facilitation Service Source responsible for developing, motivating, promoting and facilitating the development of individual small for-profit businesses for the production of goods through proven three-dimensional printing processes.

All support services including access to machinery, energy, communications and transportation are the responsibility of the non-profit Facilitation Service Source, a private foundation dedicated to programmatic success and funded by the financial returns of their local product producers through nominal post-facto percentage profit sharing. This is a viable and scalable business plan.

The pilot program develops tests and measures of success continuously.     

Capital investment is minor for Facilitation services and nil for participating producers. Amortization of investments arises directly from economic returns based upon a free and motivated cadre of participants.

This program is formulated for the Appalachian regions of America which are isolated,  historically poor and lacking a value-added industrial base offset by mineral and energy extraction. Under existing industrial investments workers have no involvement in the payoff of industry except being a source of unskilled labor. The long history of low motivation coupled to inferior educational resources and an historic lack of role models have crippled generations of communities that subsist on  labor in service and low skill industries such as mining, marginal agriculture, hourly labor pools, and employment in the service industries. Appalachian industrial and human development is characteristic of the poverty created by similar conditions throughout the world.

The project develops a new paradigm designed prima-fascia to address simultaneously the issues of human labor, capital intensity, individuals’ motivation, communities for self-sufficiency, education at every level of need, performance motivation and human capability.

Appalachia serves as a test ground for this paradigm and subsequently provides all of the tools and procedures necessary for offering this new approach to manufacturing globally through a horizontal approach to scale where facilitation is uniquely adaptable to local cultural standards.

Most new industrial paradigms for economic return and customer supply are based upon the expectation of monetary return to the developers and producers and the acquisition of corporate wealth and capital. Some industries are based upon exploitation of human labor and lack of mobility, motility and motivation.

This project is based first upon the enfranchisement of individual freely participating individuals and groups bur facilitated through ate appropriate application of modern technological capabilities for the joint and aligned purposes of achieving global customer satisfaction, increased standards of living and the eventual elimination of poverty through equitable education and meaningful labor.

I am an engineer. I look at all problems as opportunities to build solution models, combinations of mathematical relationships and conceptual designs. I am intrigued by the nature of economic development and its relationship to social evolution. In principle, I am a seeker of understanding of the universe in which we reside. That mission parallels my personal belief that the principle role of human intellectual existence in this universe is to convert information into knowledge that can be applied to the understanding of all problems.

The economic development of WV and other poorer regions of the world depends upon us to differentiate the forces of confinement between labor and innovation, between workers and innovators, between motivation and capital.  There is a cultural, behavioral, educational, and economic barrier that isolates Appalachia from the rest of the nation in the same way that all rural peoples encounter a barrier between themselves and the urban-developed world. The failure of industry inside WV derives form a culture of external exploitation that has denied the people the chance for human motivation and initiative. This project is designed to resolve all of those issues through challenging the basic premises of manufacturing technology.

West Virginia has the second lowest per-capita income in the nation, the poorest school systems, nearly the worst health standards, negligible industry and severe environmental problems due to the traditional mineral and energy extraction exploitation industries.  

The Forth Manufacturing Revolution is underway and can be developed in Appalachia through a new economic paradigm that combines the beneficial aspects of nonprofit organization with income producing self-sufficient and motivated labor.  

The people of Appalachia are honest hard-working individuals and families but geography, climate and history have combined to make economic progress nearly impossible. We have developed communities of mutual support and volunteer service, but the rapid rate of current technological progress has by-passed us in favor of other more conventional economic forces and procedures. We seek a pathway to economic self-sufficiency under difficult circumstances.  

The Fourth Manufacturing Revolution is upon us. The technology is well developed. But the implementation is still being initiated under the precepts of historical centralized and capitalistic industry. Decentralization of this technology and the application of all current modern communication, transportation and marketing capabilities will bring the fruits of this Fourth Revolution directly to the people.

The recent ongoing Covid-19 pandemic illuminates the critical aspects of a new paradigm for the fourth manufacturing revolution. The governmental response to revitalization based upon distribution of monetary funds to individuals does not create new wealth or opportunities for future advancement.  

The economic stimulus packages and financial distributions should have been constructed to develop industry rather than to develop commercial incentives. Direct investment in education, industrial development, self-sufficiency and motivation for a progressive future for all citizens yields long lasting results. Bonus packages only promote consumer spending but do not motivate future economic growth and human self-sufficiency.  

Economic revitalization must be based upon the character of the people and the power of their dedicated labors. The current capital intensive system only diminishes the effectiveness of human labor.  

We see in COVID-19 pandemic the delicate and sensitive character of our current world economy. Centralization produces chaos when the detrimental aspects of proximity are not anticipated. Our global future will reside in the decentralization of economic activity. Appalachia is test ground, our best hope for a resolution of economic issues that are not amenable to historical solutions under future difficult social conditions.  

Human objectives must employ the power of new technology to resolve: continuous decline in global standards of living; low education and lack of role models; differences between professional and working class; costs of industrial base developments; communications in rural areas; sales; marketing; distribution; and the potential for this new paradigm to level the playing field

Overcoming adversity is the nature of life for most of us. We all face individual and interactive challenges in each of our lives. Alone they may be obstacles of encumbrance. It is at the intersections of challenges and opportunities that we all find progress and advancement. These intersections often are found internally in the disparate ways that we conduct our lives. The intersections between individuals problems and capabilities constitute the arenas of progress for both. The major difficult that requires resolution is the identification of appropriate intersections.  

I was a youth in the Orient. My education was sporadic and discontinuous. I became a self-learner by necessity. During my High School years I attended the University of Nebraska by correspondence. Arriving at MIT in 1959 was a cultural as well as an academic shock. The understanding of the value of separate events in our lives can only be attained through our internal analyses of the intersections of those events and circumstances.  

Adversity is the environment in which we all reside, there is no easy one-path through our future. The challenges we have faced create the energy necessary for our individual progress. The future is what we imagine and make it.

I have been blessed by numerous opportunities to develop new paradigms to solve traditional problems. I would choose the foundation of the David Taylor Institute for Professional Self-Development as an example. The mission of the Institute is to create opportunities for individuals at any level of capability, any age, any gender and social or national background, to obtain the resources and encouragement necessary for professional self-development. The Institute was formulated for the US Navy at the David Taylor Laboratory and chartered under overhead funding. It brought together women and men for education and mutual support for the learning process in an atmosphere of professional maturity. It developed new and exciting challenges for young and old, such as the Human Powered Hovercraft Competition for High School teams. The Institute provided Professional Self-Development resources and an appropriate conducive atmosphere of motivation for participants at every level of professionalism, from skills development to theoretical developments. These resources were developed in an atmosphere of mutual support and interactive association where the participants could benefit from overlapping capabilities as they individually pursued advancement in their own areas of expertise and interest.

This is a unique organizational proposal combining profit and nonprofit attributes. Since the purpose of the project is to prove the viability and economic enhancement of the global economy and individual and family and community standards of living through the application of modern (private) 3D printing to meet national and global needs while enhancing the life style of individual families that collectively contribute to an improved global sociology and economic enhancement, the concept is necessarily built upon the best and most productive aspects of a combination of profit (to individual humans) and non-profit (nongovernmental but non-profit) organizational  attributes.

It is the theory of change that is the core innovation of this project.  

The principal attribute of my personal Theory of Change is that return on investment is higher than conventional centralized and capitalistic industry because the investment of the producer is extremely small for the production character of the endeavor and the personal human investment is in education, motivation and skills development rather than in capital. Similarly, the return on investment for the Facilitator is higher than conventional industries because of the non-profit status of the activity and the associated philanthropic contributions and promotions of socially active associations.  

The third attribute of my personal Theory of Change is the recognition that  de-centralization of manufacturing has  significant advantages over centralized manufacturing historically in light of the increasing global need to decentralize our social institutions and reduce the human concentration in our cities. The recent pandemic has decimated our global economy because of the need to decentralize our contacts with each other and to isolate our physical health from that of others. This is a trend that will continue so long as global population continues to grow. A decentralized humanity is going to become the normal for our foreseeable future.  

It is human initiative, thoughtful analysis, the building of mathematical models of complex phenomena, that lead to improvement in the human prospect. Reapplication of failing strategies designed to bring profit or recognition to individuals or privileged segments of society are worse than dysfunctional they are in fact socially retrograde.

My Theory of Change derives from a basic concept, that Impact- Opportunity (IO) is the intersection of Character, Importance and Achievability. To wit;  

IMPACT-OPPORTUNITY (IO)  = IMPACT (I)  *  OPPORTUNITY (O)

IO  =  I  *  O  

Definitions of Impact and Opportunity become;  

                IMPACT = Size of contribution * Number of effectors * Rate of contribution * Acceptance  

Impact is divided into two components, Social and Economic, or,  

                IMPACT (I)  =  Social Impact (SI)  +  Economic Impact (EI)

                I  =  SI  +  EI  

Social Impact can be defined solely as the product of education and the cultural adoption of technology or knowledge, those things we learn and learn to do become in the future the true value of labor,  

Social Impact SI)  =  Education (E)  *  Cultural Adoption (CA)

SI  =  E  *  CA  

Similarly, Economic Impact (EI) is achievable as a value added function by the ratio of Return on Investment (R) to Invested Time (T) and Capital (C), or  

Economic Impact (EI)  =  Return (R)  /  Time (T)  *  Capital (C).

EI  =  R  /  T  *  C  

The equation for Opportunity includes:  

OPPORTUNITY = Acceptance by the social community (CA)  /  Timing of the solution relative to technology (T)  *  Cost of contribution  or Capital (C),

O  =  CA  /  T  * C  

My personal bottom line for a valid Theory of Change involves all of these variables, and can be expressed in one simple equation:  

THEORY-OF-CHANGE (TC)  = IMPACT-OPORTUNITY  (IO)*  PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS (P)  

                One of the important characteristics of this equation is that Cultural Adoption (CA) has a significant second order influence on this Theory of Change.  

TC = P * { E*CA2  / T * C  +  R*CA / C2 *T2 }   

The more important question is how this paradigm will serve to transform the nature of work for all people, not just many people will this project serve. The measure of success is not quantifiable in body counts but rather in the health of the corpus.  

Invitational involvement is the heart of a team of interdisciplinary scholars with whom I have worked for over seven years on a variety of challenging socio-technological problems by seeking unconventional approaches and methodologies focused on a problematic challenge. The Heuristic Interdisciplinary Team of Scholars (HITS) is a proven, totally devoted team of outstanding renowned experts and universally recognized academic and industrial experts dedicated to resolution of multidisciplinary global problems through multidisciplinary processes. The HITS Team is an established function of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP). Dr. David Moran was one of the principal founders and developers of the HITS Team concept and implementation over the past seven years, will be the Principal Investigator and HITS Team Principal on this project. The Board of Directors of the CSSP provides organizational and programmatic oversight for the proposed project and is responsible for financial management. The Appalachian Initiative, Inc., (nonprofit, West Virginia) was founded by David Moran who serves as Principal Director for the Initiative. The purpose of the Appalachian Initiative is to develop economic vitality in Appalachia, USA, serving as a test region for the proposed methodologies.  

The Team acts as academic advisory panel to the Appalachian Initiative Board of Directors.

Five-Year Goals, Personal and Institutional:

Achieve understanding of the new paradigm for manufacturing technology

Achieve measurable proven success in Appalachia

Offer the introduction of the paradigm in Mexico

Continue the pursuit of understanding of the role of humanity in the universe

Design a model for wisdom

Demonstrate the productivity of motivated individualism

Practice the Golden Rule

Survive the next pandemic and the future Covid-N

The principal barrier that we face is for the necessity for all of us to confront the “We don’t do it that way!” (WEDIT) syndrome and our human failings of Nouveautéphobia, our fear of newness, novelty, change and innovation.  

The WEDIT syndrome is the retreat of expertise. The prior discussion of “overcoming adversity” should include a few other examples, notably two from hydrodynamics. I consulted with the US Coach for the Olympic Double Kayak K2 Team prior to the 1972 Munich Olympics, supporting the measurement of speed trials in a Navy towing tank. Mathematically I could prove that speed could be increased by the two paddlers rowing out of phase with each other by some 30 degrees. The Coach responded “I’ve spent my career drilling them to paddle synchronously,” and would not permit any experimental change from the traditional form. I still maintain that someday we will see a-synchronous K2 paddling.  

The USNA Sailing Coaches similarly rejected any exploration of the value of dynamic sail manipulation for speed enhancement while tacking. This was part of a proposal for the development of a Trident Scholar research proposal  in 1980. Recent trials in 2020 are now proving that significant speed increase can be achieved through dynamic tacking a sailboat.  

Nouveautéphobia and the WEDIT syndrome are the major barriers that currently exist in the accomplishment of our goals. The Theory of Change demonstrates this problem admirably.

Barriers are overcome by individual initiative. Goals are accomplished through the cooperative efforts of individuals drawn together by mutually equivalent philosophies and dedication to success. Barriers are unimpeded by organizations consisting of hourly employees unless they individually ascribe to, share in and are totally dedicated to the mission of that organization. As Edwards Deming so often said, “Every individual in a corporation from the janitor to the president should be able to articulate the mission of the organization in her own words and provide all of the power and authority of their position to the success of that mission.”  

My personal approach to “positive change” in the human prospect is through exploration of different new thoughts and applications designed to meet the real problems, the hard problems, not just the easily resolvable problems that are so magnetic to our self-esteem.  

An achievable plan is first and most importantly an invitation to sharing the burden of understanding and only later a call for action and commitment. The invitation must precede the challenge.

Tucker Community Foundation, Secretary

Community Trust Foundation, Executive Committee

Preston Community Fund, Liaison Chairman

West Virginia University, Full Professor, Adjunct

Garrett Community College Board, Member

Mountain Lions Club of WV, President

Garrett Community Foundation, Chairman Marketing

Tucker Community Foundation, Secretary

Garrett College Foundation, Treasurer

West Virginia Fiber Festival, Chairman   

Mountain Pride Cooperative Inc., President

MD/WV Rural Development Coalition, President

Preston County Farm Bureau, Vice President

Southern States Cooperative, Chairman

My Business Model is based upon the Personal Theory of Change presented in this paper and the resultant equation:  

TC = P * { (E * CA2 / T*C) + (R * CA / T2 *  C2)}  

First, this model needs empirical testing and validation before acceptance. That experimental testing is achievable through strict and unbiased numerical assessment of past socio-economic initiatives. That testing is proposed as a significant feature of the current proposal.  

This model has no Gaussian sweet spot. It implies that Change TC is an exponentially decreasing function of time T and Capital C. The derivative of the function for TC has no maximum except at P = 0, which is virtual point of stagnation, or when the product T*C → ꝏ  

Notably, the Business Paradigm indicates that the ratio of Social Impact to Economic Impact is inversely related to the rate of return R,  

(SI/EI) = E*CA*T*C/R  

This implies that our traditional and historical economic concept that progress is enhanced by a large return on investment is false and that Cultural Acceptance and Education have just as much significance as the pace T and capital investment C in a human enhancement endeavor.

The Theory of Change indicates that current process of throwing money at a humanistic problem is ineffective. Investments in Education and Cultural Adoption are more powerful than financial inducements in achieving “change” in the character of the world. Financial sustainability cannot be purchased through increasing expenditure. It must be won by the personal initiatives of the people effected by disability. That winning is achieved through increased understanding of human endeavor through education and cultural acceptance. These powerful tools are not end products or outputs of a process but rather inputs to the Theory of Change.  

Financial sustainability is a natural result of progress through human endeavor.

The Appalachian Initiative has raised over $ 21,460.00 as part of the Appalachian Initiative Fund of the Tucker Community Foundation, Parsons, WV. The Initiative has also secured funds under the Preston Community Fund for similar purposes.

The Appalachian Initiative currently has a MacArthur Foundation grant under review and an MIT SOLVE Gulbenkian Prize, Good Jobs and Entrepreneurship, under review.

(Currently confidential, but later available)

(Currently confidential, but later available)

To bring attention to a rural economic and cultural problem and environment that will not change under conventional economic and governmental processes but rather requires a new paradigm for recovery, and to focus attention on a new economic development process paradigm for the future of the manufacturing industry.

TBD

McArthur Foundation

Institute on Science for Global  Policy

Fundamental Questions Institute

Templeton Foundation

Council of Science Society Presidents

The Scientific Research Society

West Virginia University

The CATO Institute

Libertarian Party of West Virginia