I have learned to imagine the possibility of rapid growth. I first interviewed the founders of Google when the company had 20 employees, versus today’s 30,000, and visited Apple three years after its founding, when it had a few hundred employees rather than today’s 60,000. Big things start small.

Mr. China Comes to America

The medium-tech start-ups of SFMade (and its counterparts) are working out a strategy that combines quick response, local skills, and a global marketplace to foster manufacturing in U.S. cities. Liam Casey’s new investments in the Bay Area are designed to apply a similar model for companies several steps up the technology ladder. The purchase of Lime Lab and the opening of what he sees as an academy of high-speed manufacturing in the city could combine to bring to U.S.-based entrepreneurs, inventors, designers, and smaller companies some of the advantages now unique to Apple and a handful of other globally integrated firms—and with a greater probability than Apple’s of creating jobs in the United States.

The heart of those advantages is, again, connecting the sequential stages of the manufacturing cycle as a whole. The process naturally starts with the idea for a product. Whether the idea is practical depends crucially on how it is realized in industrial design; whether that design makes for an efficient or impractical factory experience depends on how well it is matched to process-engineering on the shop floor. Even after production begins, the design is often refined and the manufacturing process rejiggered based on real-world experience.

The closer this linkage, the faster and more efficiently an idea can be converted to tangible, marketable reality. The more evolved and responsive the feedback loop, the more precisely an organization will be able to distinguish promising projects from impractical ones. Apple has this capacity; it has teams on more or less permanent assignment to southern China to match its designers’ goals to the realities of the shop floor. But for the first time in decades, new tools are making it possible to develop this capacity for U.S. manufacturing. This means greater prospects for American innovators to convert their ideas into products—and jobs. That is what’s new, and promising. As one entrepreneur told me, asking not to be named for fear of irritating the mighty Apple, “What Apple has, internally, will now be available to smaller companies.”

In specific terms, the service that Lime Lab and a growing number of design firms can offer is a “quick iteration” way of deciding which ideas will be most practical for manufacturing. “Over the past couple of years, people have gotten used to the idea of rapid iteration in social-media firms,” Linus Chung told me. “You iterate and adapt quickly based on consumer demand. You learn to ‘fail fast.’ We’re bringing that to the hardware space.” As an illustration, he mentioned a start-up called Lark, which makes electronic sleep- and fitness-monitoring devices that are part of the broader trend toward precise, individualized indicators of health that Mark Bowden discussed recently in “The Measured Man” (July/August 2012). Lark was founded two years ago, while the overall economy was still reeling, by a Stanford-trained entrepreneur named Julia Hu. Many of its products, the latest of which is a $149.99 wristband that monitors your sleep, exercise, calorie-burning, and even degree of hydration, are now carried at Apple stores and by Best Buy and Brookstone. The electronics in this wristband are assembled in China, as are nearly all of the world’s electronics. But more of the total job growth in the company’s rise, including engineering and design work, has been in the United States than would have been the case even way back in 2009. “They started with five people, and now they have 30,” Chung, who has worked with Lark, told me. “For a company their size, you’d expect they’d need half those people in China. Now that entire team is one office in the United States.”