Then, a little over a decade ago, MIT’s “Production in the Innovation Economy” initiative highlighted the opportunities we miss if design and manufacturing teams are miles or even oceans apart—and played a significant role in shaping the nation’s Advanced Manufacturing Initiative.
Building on this legacy, and in response to an urgent national interest in restoring America’s manufacturing strength, an inspired group of MIT faculty came together in 2022 to found the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. They explored new ways to marshal MIT’s expertise in technology, the social sciences, and management to forge an intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization.
As a result of this group’s foundational work, we’ve now created the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM),which will join the ranks of our other Presidential Initiatives—all designed to help the people of MIT come together in new ways to accelerate our progress and increase our impact.
To help make manufacturing more productive, resilient, and sustainable, we aim to do the following:
–Work with firms big and small to help them adopt new approaches for increased productivity.
–Design high-quality, human-centered jobs that bring new life to communities across the country.
–Re-elevate manufacturing in MIT’s own curriculum—and provide pathways for people outside MIT to gain the skills to transform their own prospects and fuel a “new manufacturing” economy.
–Reimagine manufacturing technologies and systems to advance fields like energy production, health care, computing, transportation, consumer products, and more.
