Do you remember 1999? What was manufacturing like then?
Flip back the calendar to the turn of the millennium, and businesses were preparing their systems for Y2K, the imminent computer fiasco that would never happen. About 17.3 million people in the U.S. held manufacturing jobs, compared to 12.6 million in 2024, and productivity was at an all-time high. Leadership was mostly top-down. China had not yet eclipsed Japan as the United States’ most formidable manufacturing competitor. Cars weren’t connected, and Amazon had only recently morphed from an online bookseller to the world’s largest e-commerce platform. Blackberry and Motorola were the hot cellphone companies.
Amazingly, 25 years have flown by (though we still don't have flying cars). To commemorate that quarter of a century, we at IndustryWeek decide to come up with 25 happenings—people, events, technology, trends—that truly changed U.S. manufacturing since 2000.
Each editor compiled a list of their top choices, based on their area of manufacturing expertise, and a robust debate followed.
To make the list, an item had to have a lasting impact on manufacturing: to change thinking, approaches, processes or best practices. For instance, the Takata airbag recall and the Volkswagen diesel scandal were worldwide news that exposed corruption and drew attention to mistakes, but neither did much to change the trajectory of manufacturing. Cybercrime in manufacturing has been a growing problem, but not particularly changemaking. Exciting new technologies, like digital twins or wearable technology, are fun to play with but have had limited applications on the plant floor and have not yet reached their full potential.
To give our Manufacturing Gamechangers list a fine-tuning, we sought the help of collaborators, including past IndustryWeek editors and some of our regular contributors who live and breathe manufacturing.
For the past two weeks, we've been rolling out the gamechangers in groups of five, with an editor's take on each.
Here is the complete 25 in 2025 list, in ascending chronological order.
Did we overlook an important Gamechanger? Please let us know!
