Elon Musk (2011): Manufacturing Is a Tech Puzzle—Not Just Copy-Paste

Here's Elon Musk in 2011 explaining how to innovate quickly in manufacturing.

“Sometimes manufacturing is looked at as boring, like if you were just making copies. But there's a huge amount of innovation that occurs in manufacturing, and I think it's actually a really interesting problem.

So, I'm very pro-manufacturing and very much in favor of thinking of manufacturing like a technology problem and not just like you're just going to make copies.

You're trying to take raw materials and get them into the desired shape as efficiently as possible. It's a really interesting puzzle as to how you do that. There's a huge amount of innovation that can be applied there.

I think you have to have a tight iteration loop between engineering and production in order to apply that innovation. That's why we've got engineering and production closely physically located in Silicon Valley.”

Interview with The Motley Fool, September 29, 2011