Industry Partnership to Strategize on Competitiveness

More than 200 leaders from academia, industry and the federal government will meet at the University of Michigan on December 12 to figure out how to both bring more emerging technologies out of the lab and into the market, and find smarter ways to make current products. The aim is to create high-quality domestic manufacturing jobs and enhance the global competitiveness of the United States.

This agenda is part of the fourth and final regional meeting of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a working group advising President Obama. The public is invited to attend and offer comments. Registration is required.

"American manufacturing has been forgotten for more than a decade. Now we are engaging in a national dialogue," said Sridhar Kota, a U-M mechanical engineering professor who is serving as assistant director for advanced manufacturing at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

"The dialog is about innovation, which is not the same as invention or discovery. Innovation is translating a promising discovery into a practical product that can be scaled. That's where we seem to be falling short in this country."

Kota's expertise helped to shape the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which Obama announced in June 2011. U-M President Mary Sue Coleman and Jack Hu, the J. Reid and Polly Anderson Professor of Manufacturing Technology and an associate dean in the College of Engineering, are the university leads of an AMP group to develop recommendations on manufacturing innovation infrastructure. President Obama invited Coleman and Hu to join him for AMP's launch in June.

"The U.S. is known for basic research," Hu said. "But we need to build an infrastructure to help translate the results of such research into products and businesses. We need to retain high-value jobs and create opportunities for new employment."

In May 2012 the committee will release detailed recommendations of which emerging "high-impact" technologies could best benefit from more federal funding, and how different sectors can work together to identify emerging technologies with broad impacts going forward.

The meeting is from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the North Campus Research Complex at 2800 Plymouth Road, Building 18, Ann Arbor.