Public Lecture: Manufacturing 3.0 — Partnering to Accelerate a Digital Renaissance
| Start: | 6/5/2012 at 8:15AM |
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| End: | 6/5/2012 at 9:30AM |
| Location: | McKenna Hall Auditorium/Overflow will be presented in a video simulcast in Rooms 100-104, McKenna Hall |
| Event Url: | http://www.nd.edu/~namrcxl/Welcome.html |
| Contact: |
Michael F. Molnar, chief manufacturing officer, NIST, and director, National Program Office for Advanced Manufacturing will present a public lecture on June 5, 2012: How can the reshoring of production be turned from a trickle to a flood? How can we ensure that more of the ideas that turn into products actually get made in the U.S.? Does the federal government have a role to play in achieving these goals? Why are policymakers and industry leaders so focused on advanced manufacturing and using words like “renaissance”?
Despite a conventional image that manufacturing is “dirty, dumb, dangerous, and disappearing” in the United States — and operations naturally move to low labor cost countries — a “reshoring” trend is in evidence. In part this is due to technology and advanced productivity making U.S. production globally competitive. It is also due to increasing awareness of the strategic nature of advanced manufacturing and the synergy between innovation and production. A key challenge to strengthening the US manufacturing sector is in addressing the technical and business barriers of scaling-up, and one means of strengthening technology clusters is in industry-led public/private partnerships.
This plenary talk explores the proposed National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NMMI) as a means to accelerate U.S. innovation. Each manufacturing institute in the network would be chartered in a competitively selected topic to address the scale-up of new materials or processes. The focus is on pre-competitive needs of industry partnering with academia to create “innovation hubs” for transformational impact. A good example of this is in the pilot manufacturing institute - to be awarded this summer - in the area of additive manufacturing. Additive, or direct manufacturing, has the potential to usher in a third digitally-enabled “manufacturing revolution.” Digital manufacturing offers the ability to produce customized products cost effectively in smaller numbers with greater flexibility. By creating and supporting more effective partnerships between manufacturers, universities, and R&D labs, transformational ideas like direct manufacturing can be a core U.S. technical competency.
