The Bill That Could Truly, Actually Bring Back U.S. Manufacturing
On paper, Cadenza Innovation is everything a modern American start-up is supposed to be.
The Connecticut-based company was founded by an award-winning Swedish chemist who first came to the United States to work at MIT. It promised a major breakthrough: lithium-ion batteries that were far less likely to explode than conventional designs. It soon found R&D support from the federal government, eager to promote an industry as essential to smartphones as to addressing climate change.
In short, Cadenza showcased every innovation-boosting feature of the American economy: its openness to immigrants, its world-leading research institutions, and its generous public research support.
Yet when it came time to mass-produce Cadenza batteries, the company looked abroad. In 2018, Cadenza for mass production to BAK Power, a Chinese conglomerate. It is one of at least three American companies at the frontier of battery technology that have recently licensed their work to, or been outright acquired by,
