Manufacturing Application Centers

Building and maintaining a successful innovation system in manufacturing requires a combination of basic research, development and engineering, prototyping, and commercialization. The United States funds and conducts extensive basic research and possesses the manufacturing base to commercialize products, but lacks the development, engineering, and prototyping assets that enables ideas to move from mind to market.

Several of our main global competitors in advanced manufacturing have established innovation centers to bridge this “missing middle.” In Germany, there is an extensive network of Fraunhofer Centers that are funded by industry, universities, and government. In Taiwan, there is the Industrial Technology Research Institute, jointly funded by industry and government. But in the United States, no such national network of innovation centers exists.

The Manufacturing Institute is working to organize individual centers of manufacturing innovation into such a national network and promote those assets to manufacturers. These include:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently announced a competition to establish and fund a network of Manufacturing Demonstration Facilities.