Society is on the cusp of transformation in work, driven in part by autonomous technologies building on AI, IoT, and robotics. The result is a new human-machine ecology where automation and agency are deeply intertwined, promoting the need to rethink human-machine productivity as well as industrial methods and professions. We further observe that all of this is situated in locally sited global configurations. A small town in the American Midwest, Columbus, Indiana has enjoyed cooperation from Japanese industry for decades, with a particular emphasis on automotive manufacturing. 
 Researchers in industry, the policy community, and informatics are inquiring about the future of work. In this study, we seek to construct actionable understandings of the future of work as it might look in the rural Midwest in industrial settings with long-running Japanese-American cooperation. The central concept is transnational innovation. Transnational innovation both depends on and also produces sociotechnical systems, and thus is a question for informatics research. The proposed project contributes to understandings of the social and economic consequences of emerging technologies, supports IT development in a strategic way, and sheds light on associated educational and training needs to bring about the next generation of local workforce with a global outlook.