Companies See High-Tech Factories as Fonts of Ideas

Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times

Workers at a G.E. battery plant in upstate New York. G.E. has researchers nearby, which allows for more collaboration.

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. — The Obama administration has long heralded the potential of American factories to offer good, stable middle-class jobs in an economy that desperately needs them. But experts say there might be another advantage to expanding manufacturing in the United States: a more innovative economy.

A growing chorus of economists, engineers and business leaders are warning that the evisceration of the manufacturing work force over the last 30 years might not have scarred just Detroit and the Rust Belt. It might have dimmed the country’s capacity to innovate and stunted the prospects for long-term growth.

“In sector after sector, we’ve lost our innovation edge because we don’t produce goods here anymore,” said Mitzi Montoya, dean of the college of technology and innovation at Arizona State University.

These experts say that in industries that produce complex, high-technology products — things like bioengineered tissues, not light bulbs — companies that keep their research and manufacturing employees close together might be more innovative than businesses that develop a schematic and send it overseas for low-wage workers to make. Moreover, clusters of manufacturers, where workers and ideas can naturally flow between companies, might prove more productive and innovative than the same businesses if they were spread across the country.

A General Electric facility in upstate New York provides a test case. In a custom-built facility the size of four football fields, workers are casting into thin tubes a kind of ceramic that G.E. invented. Those tubes get filled with a secret chemical “brownie mix,” packaged into batteries and shipped across the world.

The plant sits just a few miles down the road from the research campus where G.E. scientists developed the technology. That allows them to work out kinks on the assembly line, and test prototypes of and uses for the battery, the company’s scientists said.

“We’re not thinking about just one generation,” said Glen Merfeld of G.E.’s chemical energy systems laboratory, showing off a test battery his employees had run into exhaustion. “We’re working on the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth.”

The idea is to knit together manufacturing, design, prototyping and production, said Michael Idelchik, vice president for advanced technologies, who holds a dozen patents himself. “We believe that rather than a sequential process where you look at product design and then how to manufacture it, there is a simultaneous process,” Mr. Idelchik said. “We think it is key for sustaining our long-term competitive advantage.”

Economists and policy experts are now researching whether such strategies offer the same benefits for other businesses — and examining how those benefits might show up in national data on innovation, productivity and growth.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Suzanne Berger has helped to start the Production in the Innovation Economy project to study the subject. “It is something that’s very difficult to establish systematically,” said Professor Berger. “You really have to be willing to look at case-by-case evidence, qualitative evidence. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

Thus far, she said, the anecdotal evidence from about 200 companies has proved striking, with company after company detailing the advantages of keeping makers and thinkers together. That does not mean every business, she stressed. Companies with products early in their life cycle seemed to benefit more than ones with products on the market for years. So did companies making especially complicated or advanced goods, from new medicines to new machines.

“It’s the companies where the challenge of producing on a commercial scale requires levels of scientific activity that are just as complex as the original challenge of developing the technology,” Professor Berger said.

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In Cairo Crisis, Unheard Voice From the Poor

Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times

In Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there had been little expectation that leaders would provide. But the disregard of the new president has been harder to take. More Photos »

CAIRO — A faded poster of Hosni Mubarak hangs on a wall in a crumbling neighborhood here, reminding residents of an empty pledge to find jobs for young people. Down the street, a campaign banner for his successor, Mohamed Morsi, hangs across the road, a reminder of more recent promises unkept.

In the neighborhood, called Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there was little expectation that Mr. Mubarak would provide. But Mr. Morsi’s disregard has been much harder to take.

“We had high hopes in God, that things would improve,” Fathi Hussein said as he built a desk of dark wood for one of his clients, who are dwindling. “I elected a president to be good for the country. I did not elect him to impose his opinions on me.”

Away from the protests and violence that have marked the painful struggle over Egypt’s identity in the run-up to a referendum on Saturday on a constitution, residents of Boulaq have their own reasons to be consumed with the crisis. The chants of the protesters, for bread and freedom, resonate in Boulaq’s alleyways. In many of its industrial workshops, passed from struggling fathers to penniless sons, disappointment with the president, his Muslim Brotherhood supporters as well as the leaders of the opposition grows daily.

There is a sense in Boulaq that the raging arguments would be better resolved in places like this, where most Egyptians live, carrying the burdens of poverty with no help from an indifferent state, and where the revolution’s promise of dignity is long overdue.

When he took office five months ago, Mr. Morsi seemed to understand. “He talked about the conditions of the poor, the people in the slums,” said Amr Abdul Hafiz, a barber. “He talked about the street vendors and the tuk-tuk drivers. We thought he felt for us.”

The barber and many of his neighbors were convinced that Mr. Morsi and the Brotherhood had earned their chance to rule. People remembered the Brotherhood’s charity after the earthquake in 1992, and its decades of struggle as an outlaw movement. In stages, though, doubts grew as the Brotherhood broke its promises and Mr. Morsi seized power, culminating in his decision to ram through his constitution. Boulaq’s residents, including the president’s supporters, bristled at the thought of being treated as subjects again.

“He became occupied with other issues,” Mr. Abdul Hafiz said. “They want power, to make up for all the injustice they suffered, as if we were the ones who inflicted the injustice on them.”

At night, the arguments rage at a storied cafe on Abu Talib Street, with an intensity that no one here recalls seeing before. By day, the arguments simmer, in a neighborhood whose former grandeur still peeks out from underneath the rot.

Everywhere, people tell stories about the government’s failures, suggesting that the new leaders had turned out no better than the old ones.

In the shadow of a fallen dwelling, one of many that make Boulaq look as if it suffered a war, a widow stood over workmen she had hired to fix a ruptured sewer pipe. The ministry assigned to handle such matters had ignored her calls for three months, so she and her neighbors collected the money to pay for the repairs themselves.

On Abu Talib Street, Mr. Abdul Hafiz fretted over the dangers facing his pregnant wife, whose belly was swelling with excessive amniotic fluid. An appointment to see a doctor at a private hospital, which would cost $80, was too expensive. The administrators at a public hospital told her she could see a doctor a month after she was supposed to give birth.

Security guards threw Mr. Abdul Hafiz out of the hospital when he pointed out how ridiculous that was.

He wanted a change from Mr. Mubarak, who had coverings placed over the houses in Boulaq during the public opening of a nearby building “to hide insects like us.” It was part of a pattern of neglect that stretched back for decades, when the land under the residents was sold to investors in shady deals that no one has untangled.

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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State of the Art: Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google, which had always supplied the data for the iPhone’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself.

As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour.

Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world.

That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic.

Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free.

But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads.

The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.

Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.

So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”

Um, what?

And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often.

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options.

This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building, the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal.” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge.” And so on.

Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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Eli Lilly to Conduct Additional Study of Alzheimer’s Drug

The drug maker Eli Lilly & Company said on Wednesday that it planned an additional study of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that failed to improve the condition of people with the disease, saying that it remained hopeful about the drug’s prospects.

The newest study is expected to get under way in the third quarter of 2013 and will focus on patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly released results of two clinical trials in August that showed the drug, called solanezumab, did not significantly improve either the cognition or the daily functioning of people with mild and moderate forms of the disease. But despite that failure, the results also gave some reason for hope: when patients with mild Alzheimer’s were separated out, the drug was shown to significantly slow their decline in cognition.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company said it decided not to pursue approval of the drug based on existing study results after it met with officials from the Food and Drug Administration. A Lilly executive said, however, that the company was still optimistic.

“We remain encouraged and excited by the solanezumab data,” David Ricks, a senior vice president at Lilly and president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, said in the statement. “We are committed to working with the F.D.A. and other regulatory authorities to bring solanezumab to the millions of patients and caregivers suffering from this devastating disease who urgently need this potential treatment.”

The Lilly drug is the second Alzheimer’s treatment to fail in clinical trials this year. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stopped development of a similar treatment, bapineuzumab, after it, too, was not shown to work. Both drugs target beta amyloid, a protein in the brain that is found in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Lilly shares closed at $49, down 3.2 percent.

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Eli Lilly to Conduct Additional Study of Alzheimer’s Drug

The drug maker Eli Lilly & Company said on Wednesday that it planned an additional study of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug that failed to improve the condition of people with the disease, saying that it remained hopeful about the drug’s prospects.

The newest study is expected to get under way in the third quarter of 2013 and will focus on patients with mild Alzheimer’s disease. Lilly released results of two clinical trials in August that showed the drug, called solanezumab, did not significantly improve either the cognition or the daily functioning of people with mild and moderate forms of the disease. But despite that failure, the results also gave some reason for hope: when patients with mild Alzheimer’s were separated out, the drug was shown to significantly slow their decline in cognition.

In a statement on Wednesday, the company said it decided not to pursue approval of the drug based on existing study results after it met with officials from the Food and Drug Administration. A Lilly executive said, however, that the company was still optimistic.

“We remain encouraged and excited by the solanezumab data,” David Ricks, a senior vice president at Lilly and president of Lilly Bio-Medicines, said in the statement. “We are committed to working with the F.D.A. and other regulatory authorities to bring solanezumab to the millions of patients and caregivers suffering from this devastating disease who urgently need this potential treatment.”

The Lilly drug is the second Alzheimer’s treatment to fail in clinical trials this year. Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson stopped development of a similar treatment, bapineuzumab, after it, too, was not shown to work. Both drugs target beta amyloid, a protein in the brain that is found in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Lilly shares closed at $49, down 3.2 percent.

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State of the Art: Google Maps App for iPhone Goes in the Right Direction - Review

It was one of the biggest tech headlines of the year: in September, Apple dropped its contract with Google, which had always supplied the data for the iPhone’s Maps app. For various strategic reasons, Apple preferred to write a new app, based on a new database of the world that Apple intended to assemble itself.

As everybody knows by now, Apple got lost along the way. It was like a 22-car pileup. Timothy Cook, Apple’s chief executive, made a quick turn, publicly apologizing, firing the executive responsible and vowing to fix Maps. For a company that prides itself on flawless execution, it was quite a detour.

Rumors swirled that Google would create an iPhone app of its own, one that would use its seven-year-old, far more polished database of the world.

That was true. Today, Google Maps for the iPhone has arrived. It’s free, fast and fantastic.

Now, there are two parts to a great maps app. There’s the app itself — how it looks, how it works, what the features are. In this regard, few people complain about Apple’s Maps app; it’s beautiful, and its navigation mode for drivers is clear, uncluttered and distraction-free.

But then there’s the hard part: the underlying data. Apple and Google have each constructed staggeringly complex databases of the world and its roads.

The recipe for both companies includes map data from TomTom, satellite photography from a different source, real-time traffic data from others, restaurant and store listings from still more sources, and so on. In the end, Apple says that it incorporated data from at least 24 different sources.

Those sources always include errors, if only because the world constantly changes. Worse, those sources sometimes disagree with one another. It takes years to fix the problems and mesh these data sources together.

So the first great thing about Google’s new Maps is the underlying data. Hundreds of Google employees have spent years hand-editing the maps, fixing the thousands of errors that people report every day. (In the new app, you report a mistake just by shaking the phone.) And since 2006, Google’s Street View vehicles have trawled 3,000 cities, photographing and confirming the cartographical accuracy of five million miles of roads.

You can sense the new app’s polish and intelligence the minute you enter your first address; it’s infinitely more understanding. When I type “200 W 79, NYC,” Google Maps drops a pin right where it belongs: on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Apple’s Maps app, on the other hand, acts positively drunk. It asks me to clarify: “Did you mean 200 Durham Road, Madison, CT? Or 200 Madison Road, Durham, CT?”

Um, what?

And then there’s the navigation. Lots of iPhone owners report that they’ve had no problem with Apple’s driving instructions, and that’s great. But I’ve been idiotically misdirected a few times — and the trouble is, you never know in advance. You wind up with a deep mistrust of the app that’s hard to shake. Google’s directions weren’t great in the app’s early days either, and they’re still not always perfect. But after years of polishing and corrections, they’re right a lot more often.

The must-have features are all here: spoken driving directions, color-coded real-time traffic conditions, vector-based maps (smooth at any size). But the new app also offers some incredibly powerful, useful features that Apple’s app lacks.

Street View, of course, lets you see a photograph of a place, and even “walk” down the street in any direction. Great for checking out a neighborhood before you go, scoping out the parking situation or playing “you are there” when you read a news article.

Along with driving directions, Google Maps gives equal emphasis to walking directions and public transportation options.

This feature is brilliantly done. Google Maps displays a clean, step-by-step timeline of your entire public transportation adventure. If you ask for a route from Westport, Conn., to the Empire State Building, the timeline says: “4:27 pm, Board New Haven train toward Grand Central Terminal.” Then it shows you the names of the actual train stops you’ll pass. Then, “5:47 pm, Grand Central. Get off and walk 2 min.” Then, “5:57 pm, 33rd St: Board the #6 Lexington Avenue Local towards Brooklyn Bridge.” And so on.

Even if public transportation were all it did, Google Maps would be one of the best apps ever. (Apple kicks you over to other companies’ apps for this information.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

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North Koreans Launch Rocket in Defiant Act

KCNA, via Reuters

This photo released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency shows North Korean technicians monitoring the launch of an Unha-3 rocket carrying the satellite Kwangmyongsong-3, or Shining Star-3, into orbit on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON — The United States and its Asian allies began an effort on Wednesday to impose additional sanctions on North Korea after its largely successful rocket launching, but this time Washington added a warning to China: Failure to rein in Kim Jong-un, the North’s new leader, will result in an even greater American military presence in the Pacific.

The Chinese government, which sent a delegation to Pyongyang last month to warn against the missile test, said it “regrets” the launching, which put a 200-pound earth surveillance satellite into orbit.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said that North Korea’s right to a peaceful space program was subject to “limitations” by United Nations Security Council resolutions. But he declined to say whether North Korea had failed to live up to those obligations, which include a prohibition on launchings like the one on Wednesday morning that could be used to advance missile technology.

In fact, after a preliminary meeting of the Security Council members in New York, it was far from clear how far the Chinese are willing to go in further punishing an ally they once called as close as “lips and teeth.” Beijing’s biggest fear has always been destabilizing North Korea, and setting off a collapse that could put South Korean forces, and perhaps their American allies, on China’s border.

But the essence of the American strategy, as described Wednesday by administration officials, was to force the Chinese into an uncomfortable choice.

“The kinds of things we would do to enhance the region’s security against a North Korean nuclear missile capability,” one senior administration official said in an interview, “are indistinguishable from the things the Chinese would view as a containment strategy” aimed at Beijing.

They would include increased patrols in waters the Chinese are trying to claim as part of their exclusive zone, along with military exercises with allies in the region. “It’s the right approach, but whether it works is another matter,” said Christopher R. Hill, who was the chief negotiator with North Korea during President George W. Bush’s second term, and is now dean of the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, on Wednesday. “The approach of thickening up the antimissile effort is something that would get China’s attention.”

Many of those efforts are planned anyway as part of President Obama’s “rebalancing” strategy to ensure a continued American presence in Asia. The president has repeatedly said he has neither the desire nor the ability to contain China’s rise, but the rebalancing is clearly intended to keep the Chinese from nudging the United States out of the region.

Already, the Chinese believe that America’s antimissile efforts from Alaska to the Pacific are designed to counter their own nuclear arsenal.

Administration officials said that while the launching was successful — and advanced the North’s missile program — it was hardly a threat to the United States, despite a warning by Robert M. Gates in 2011, when he was secretary of defense, that the North would have a missile capable of reaching the United States by 2016.

“I am not disparaging this demonstration of 1950s Sputnik-quality technology,” the administration official said, referring to the Soviet satellite that prompted the space race during the cold war. He then went on to disparage it, noting that Mr. Kim “is in the family business, like his daddy before him, and it’s a form of extortion.”

South Korean officials sounded similar themes, saying that the North’s effort was to extract a higher price — in aid, investment and diplomatic concessions — for restraining future launchings or nuclear tests.

Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a private group in Washington, called the North Korean satellite launching “a fundamental breakthrough” that showed the main elements of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and William J. Broad from New York. Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea.

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Study Predicts Future for U.S. as No. 2 Economy, but Energy Independent

WASHINGTON — A new intelligence assessment of global trends projects that China will outstrip the United States as the leading economic power before 2030, but that America will remain an indispensable world leader, bolstered in part by an era of energy independence.

Russia’s clout will wane, as will the economic strength of other countries reliant on oil for revenues, the assessment says.

“There will not be any hegemonic power,” the 166-page report says. “Power will shift to networks and coalitions in a multipolar world.”

The product of four years of intelligence-gathering and analysis, the study, by the National Intelligence Council, presents grounds for optimism and pessimism in nearly equal measure. The council reports to the director of national intelligence and has responsibilities for long-term strategic analysis.

One remarkable development it anticipates is a spreading affluence that leads to a larger global middle class that is better educated and has wider access to health care and communications technologies like the Internet and smartphones. “The growth of the global middle class constitutes a tectonic shift,” the study says, adding that billions of people will gain new individual power as they climb out of poverty. “For the first time, a majority of the world’s population will not be impoverished, and the middle classes will be the most important social and economic sector in the vast majority of countries around the world.”

At the same time, it warns, half of the world’s population will probably be living in areas that suffer from severe shortages of fresh water, meaning that management of natural resources will be a crucial component of global national security efforts.

The study also warns of the risk that terrorists could mount a computer-network attack in which the casualties would be measured not by the hundreds or thousands killed but by the millions severely affected by damaged infrastructure, like electrical grids being taken down.

At least 15 countries are “at high risk of state failure” by 2030, the report predicts, among them Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen.

The study acknowledges that the future “is malleable,” and it lists important “game changers” that will most influence the global scene through 2030: a crisis-prone world economy, shortcomings in governance, conflicts within states and between them, the impact of new technologies and whether the United States can “work with new partners to reinvent the international system.”

The best-case situation for global security until 2030, according to the study, would be a growing political partnership between the United States and China. But it could take a crisis to bring Washington and Beijing together — something like a nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan resolved only by bold cooperation between the United States and China.

The worst-case situation envisions a stalling of economic globalization that would preclude advancement of financial well-being around the world. That would be a likely outcome after an outbreak of a health pandemic that, even if short-lived, would result in closed borders and economic isolationism.

The chief author and manager of the project, Mathew Burrows, who is counselor for the National Intelligence Council, said the findings had been presented in advance in more than 20 nations to groups of academic experts, business leaders and government officials, including local intelligence officers.

In an interview, Mr. Burrows noted that the audiences in China were far more accepting of the American intelligence assessments — both those predicting China’s economic ascendancy and those warning of political dangers if there was no reform of governance in Beijing — than were audiences in Russia.

To assess the validity of this study, the research and analysis team graded its past work on global trends, an effort undertaken every four years since 1996. Past studies, it found, underestimated the speed with which changes arrived on the global scene.

Concerns were raised that past reports may have suffered “blind spots and biases.” And while grand “isms” like fascism and communism might not be on the horizon, this study noted, previous assessments should have paid greater attention to ideology.

The risk of conflict within a state — like a civil war or an insurgency — is expected to decline in Latin America, but will remain high in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, and in some Asia-Pacific island hot spots, the study warns.

“A more fragmented international system increases the risks” of conflict between states, the study says. “Additionally, increased resource competition, spread of lethal technologies and spillover from regional conflicts increase the potential for interstate conflicts.”

Most worrisome — and already a part of the global security dynamic — is an assessment that future wars in Asia and the Middle East could include nuclear weapons.

Other important demographic trends will be aging populations in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, which could slow their economies further. The report warns that Russia’s economy will join those places in experiencing “slow relative declines.” The United States will benefit from its domestic oil and natural gas supplies and new technologies to tap them, allowing the nation to become energy independent and even a net exporter of fuel.

In general, it found, “the health of the global economy increasingly will be linked to how well the developing world does — more so than the traditional West.”

In addition to China, the developing nations that “will become especially important to the global economy” include Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey.

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Concussion Liability Issues Could Stretch Beyond N.F.L.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press

Insurers could raise premiums with a higher risk of lawsuits for concussions, like the one 49ers quarterback Alex Smith sustained a month ago.

As the N.F.L. confronts a raft of lawsuits brought by thousands of former players who accuse the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions, a less visible battle that may have a more widespread effect in the sport is unfolding between the league and 32 of its current and former insurers.

The dispute revolves around how much money, if any, the insurers are obliged to pay for the league’s mounting legal bills and the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages that might stem from the cases brought by the retired players.

Regardless of how it is resolved, the dispute could hurt teams, leagues and schools at all levels if insurers raise premiums to compensate for the increased risk of lawsuits from the families of people who play hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports.

The N.F.L., which generates about $9 billion a year, may be equipped to handle these legal challenges. But colleges, high schools and club teams may be forced to consider severe measures in the face of liability issues, like raising fees to offset higher premiums; capping potential damages; and requiring players to sign away their right to sue coaches and schools. Some schools and leagues may even shut down teams because the expense and legal risk are too high.

“Insurers will be tightening up their own coverage and make sports more expensive,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at New York University. “It could make the sustainability of certain sports a real issue.”

The N.F.L. contends that the insurers, some of whom wrote policies in the 1960s, have a duty to defend the league, which has paid them millions of dollars in premiums. The question for the N.F.L. is not whether the insurers are required to help the league, but rather what percent of the league’s expenses each insurer is obliged to cover.

The 32 insurance companies have varying arguments against the league. Some wrote policies for a limited number of years and contend their obligations should also be limited. Others contend they wrote policies for the N.F.L.’s marketing arm — for licensing disputes, for example — not the league itself.

A few of the companies went bankrupt or merged with rivals. Some insurers wrote primary policies that covered up to the first $1 million of claims; the rest insured obligations in excess of that amount.

Creating a formula for how to apportion liability will in some cases depend on the broader case between the league and its players now in federal court in Pennsylvania. If the N.F.L. persuades the judge to dismiss the case, the league will be left trying to recoup its legal costs from the insurers. If the judge allows the players’ case to proceed, the definitions of when, how and whether a player’s concussions led to his illness will become critical in shaping the insurers’ exposure, and could take years to sort out.

“This is baby step 1 in the process for everyone figuring how deep in the soup they are,” said Christopher Fusco, a lawyer who has worked on similar insurance cases but is not involved in the N.F.L. litigation. “Baby step 2 will be to figure out the facts.”

Fusco and other lawyers said the facts would largely come from the underlying suit between the league and the more than 3,000 retired players, including determining when the players sustained the head trauma and their injuries. This will probably be a long process because many of the retired players in the underlying suit, some of whom are now having memory loss, played decades ago, when concussions were often undiagnosed or not recorded.

Many of the insurance companies named in the suits declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation. The N.F.L. also did not comment.

The two-tiered battle between the league and its former players and insurers echoes the litigation stemming from asbestos claims because both cases center on long-tail claims, or injuries that could take years to manifest themselves.

One of the critical points of contention in those cases was how to define an occurrence to determine an insurer’s liability. In the context of the N.F.L. case, the question will be whether a player’s injuries should be treated as a single claim or a series of claims based on the number of concussions he received or the number of seasons he played.

“This is an issue that gets to the crux of asbestos and environmental litigation,” said William M. Wilt, the president of Assured Research, an insurance advisory firm. “If an occurrence is defined as each player and each season he played, you could hit the policy limits multiple times.”

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Concussion Liability Issues Could Stretch Beyond N.F.L.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./The Sacramento Bee, via Associated Press

Insurers could raise premiums with a higher risk of lawsuits for concussions, like the one 49ers quarterback Alex Smith sustained a month ago.

As the N.F.L. confronts a raft of lawsuits brought by thousands of former players who accuse the league of hiding information about the dangers of concussions, a less visible battle that may have a more widespread effect in the sport is unfolding between the league and 32 of its current and former insurers.

The dispute revolves around how much money, if any, the insurers are obliged to pay for the league’s mounting legal bills and the hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages that might stem from the cases brought by the retired players.

Regardless of how it is resolved, the dispute could hurt teams, leagues and schools at all levels if insurers raise premiums to compensate for the increased risk of lawsuits from the families of people who play hockey, lacrosse and other contact sports.

The N.F.L., which generates about $9 billion a year, may be equipped to handle these legal challenges. But colleges, high schools and club teams may be forced to consider severe measures in the face of liability issues, like raising fees to offset higher premiums; capping potential damages; and requiring players to sign away their right to sue coaches and schools. Some schools and leagues may even shut down teams because the expense and legal risk are too high.

“Insurers will be tightening up their own coverage and make sports more expensive,” said Robert Boland, who teaches sports law at New York University. “It could make the sustainability of certain sports a real issue.”

The N.F.L. contends that the insurers, some of whom wrote policies in the 1960s, have a duty to defend the league, which has paid them millions of dollars in premiums. The question for the N.F.L. is not whether the insurers are required to help the league, but rather what percent of the league’s expenses each insurer is obliged to cover.

The 32 insurance companies have varying arguments against the league. Some wrote policies for a limited number of years and contend their obligations should also be limited. Others contend they wrote policies for the N.F.L.’s marketing arm — for licensing disputes, for example — not the league itself.

A few of the companies went bankrupt or merged with rivals. Some insurers wrote primary policies that covered up to the first $1 million of claims; the rest insured obligations in excess of that amount.

Creating a formula for how to apportion liability will in some cases depend on the broader case between the league and its players now in federal court in Pennsylvania. If the N.F.L. persuades the judge to dismiss the case, the league will be left trying to recoup its legal costs from the insurers. If the judge allows the players’ case to proceed, the definitions of when, how and whether a player’s concussions led to his illness will become critical in shaping the insurers’ exposure, and could take years to sort out.

“This is baby step 1 in the process for everyone figuring how deep in the soup they are,” said Christopher Fusco, a lawyer who has worked on similar insurance cases but is not involved in the N.F.L. litigation. “Baby step 2 will be to figure out the facts.”

Fusco and other lawyers said the facts would largely come from the underlying suit between the league and the more than 3,000 retired players, including determining when the players sustained the head trauma and their injuries. This will probably be a long process because many of the retired players in the underlying suit, some of whom are now having memory loss, played decades ago, when concussions were often undiagnosed or not recorded.

Many of the insurance companies named in the suits declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation. The N.F.L. also did not comment.

The two-tiered battle between the league and its former players and insurers echoes the litigation stemming from asbestos claims because both cases center on long-tail claims, or injuries that could take years to manifest themselves.

One of the critical points of contention in those cases was how to define an occurrence to determine an insurer’s liability. In the context of the N.F.L. case, the question will be whether a player’s injuries should be treated as a single claim or a series of claims based on the number of concussions he received or the number of seasons he played.

“This is an issue that gets to the crux of asbestos and environmental litigation,” said William M. Wilt, the president of Assured Research, an insurance advisory firm. “If an occurrence is defined as each player and each season he played, you could hit the policy limits multiple times.”

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