The White House and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently announced a partnership that hopes to boost manufacturing in the United States. MIT’s President Susan Hockfield and President Barack Obama will be working together spearheading the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP). The group will attempt to bring industries, universities, and the federal government together to invest in American industry.
“Since World War II, America’s research universities have played a key role in the nation’s innovation economy. The longstanding relationships that make this innovation model run between universities and government, and universities and corporations remain tremendously productive and important,” said Hockfield in an MIT press release.
Hockfield will co-chair AMP with Dow Chemical Company’s CEO Andrew Liveris. The major goals of the project include helping manufacturers decrease costs while improving quality and speed of production. Keeping the United States globally competitive as the economy suffers is getting harder and harder.
“But the economy tells us every day, ‘business as usual’ is not enough anymore,” Hockfield stated. “America’s remarkably effective model of innovation-based economic growth is now being copied and aggressively invested in by nations around the globe.”
AMP’s other partners besides industry leaders and the federal government include the presidents of Carnegie Mellon, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The 16th President of MIT, Susan Hockfield is a noted neuroscientist and continues to instruct courses in neuroscience as a professor while running MIT at the same time. Her partnership with the White House in order to boost innovation is no surprise as she has focused on collaborative work with MIT’s many schools and different interdisciplinary departments to continue making MIT one of the nation’s top universities.
“I’m enthusiastic about the spirit and content of our joint work,” Hockfield said in a university press release. “And, I’m also very eager to build new connections with our colleagues in industry and government with a commitment to advancing the manufacturing frontier together.”
Developed based on the recommendations of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology in a lengthy report titled, “Ensuring Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing,” AMP builds on already existing programs. AMP will invest more than $500 million to get the project off the ground. Investments in the following fields include building domestic manufacturing capabilities in national security, advanced materials production, robotics, new technologies, and areas of increased energy efficiency in the manufacturing process.
“Today, I’m calling for all of us to come together: private sector industry, universities, and the government to spark a renaissance in American manufacturing and help our manufacturers develop the cutting-edge tools they need to compete with anyone in the world,” said President Obama in a recent White House statement. “With these key investments, we can ensure that the United States remains a nation that ‘invents it here and manufactures it here’ and creates high-quality, good paying jobs for American workers.”
