It would require targeting centers efforts to helping high-road shops get more systematic, and lean commodity shops to get more modern and distinctive. They have already demonstrated success at getting companies to take actions associated with becoming more systematic, so part of the reorientation would simply require brining those services to a different, and admittedly smaller, audience. Getting lean commodity shops to bet the store on the high road would be a more daunting challenge. Field staff would need to be both technically strong able to match technologies to applications and strategically sophisticated. It requires cost accounting and investment justification expertise, familiarity with product design and engineering, and intimate knowledge of the markets available to the client shop.
Small shops deserve no less.
As Figure 3 shows using 1995 Performance Benchmarking data for a group of metalforming and plastics processing shops, there would be large productivity, wage, and profit payoffs to such a reoriented extension mission. Extension center sponsors could encourage the placement of high road manufacturers on centers boards of directors. Our economy has plenty of room for making more of what is produced in higher-road ways. What might just work is a reconfigured extension movement that specializes in services that while available to all smaller manufacturers, are in practice of use mainly to companies that deserve to win.