Collaboration, manufacturing ecosystems, industrial commons – those terms of cooperative research and manufacturing competitiveness were the primary themes of the first annual Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute Industry Partners Symposium. Held on Oct. 1, the event drew nearly 100 industry and government partners to discuss the challenges currently facing the U.S. manufacturing sector.

Dr. Ben Wang, Executive Director of GTMI and Georgia Tech’s Chief Manufacturing Officer, pointed to two grand challenges facing manufacturing today:

• How do we accelerate innovation and create and deliver new customer values?
• How do we promote the idea of “discover here, build here?”

To address these challenges, he recommended that we re-establish the Bell Labs model. Bell Labs developed a number of technologies that continue to impact our lives today. This model was so successful, because: “They provided constant and continuous interactions; they were guided by leaders and visionaries; they fully coupled technology push with market pull; they had ‘patient capital’ for basic research that didn’t seem relevant; and finally, they had a different regulatory environment than what exists today,” explained Dr. Wang. “It was a microcosm of an innovation ecosystem.”

Unfortunately, the Bell Labs model began to disintegrate in the United States when research was outsourced to the universities and production to low-cost markets. But this microcosm of innovation that existed in the Bell Labs needs to return on a national basis in order for the U.S. to regain its global leadership in the manufacturing arena.

The sentiment was echoed by various speakers and panels throughout the day. Nancey Green Leigh, Associate Dean for Research, Georgia Tech College of Architecture, said that “As manufacturing was outsourced, the U.S. experienced a loss of industrial commons, or a lost capacity for future and ongoing innovation.” But today, she noted, the United States is putting more emphasis on building the manufacturing sector here. “In Obama’s first term, the focus was to double exports,” she said. “In the second term, the White House is developing a multi-prong strategy to strengthen manufacturing by considering reform of the U.S. business code, establishing a network of manufacturing innovation institutes, and bringing jobs back.”

Michael Groesch, Vice President of Sales and Operations and Product Life Cycle at NCR, a participant on the additive manufacturing panel discussion, said that this is imperative to advancing new disruptive technologies such as 3D printing. “Collaborating in a pre-competitive arena and developing those commons [in these technologies] will help us maintain that leading edge,” he explained. 

In addition to building ecosystems, innovation acceleration will require the United States to put more emphasis on the entire innovation chain. Currently, Dr. Wang noted, there is a lot of federal money funding research at the university level on the knowledge discovery side of the equation.  Industry, on the other side of the equation, invests billions of dollars in developing new product. The problem for the United States is that middle ground of moving those concepts developed in the lab to the market place, or what Dr. Wang calls the “valley of death” in terms of technology maturation. “Today the full cycle of technology maturation takes about 20 years,” said Dr. Wang. “This is unacceptable. The process takes too long, it is too expensive, and the results are too random.”

Over the past few decades, the United States has ignored manufacturing and that has resulted in trade deficits, lost jobs, national debts and a loss of competitiveness for the United States. But there is hope, according to Dr. Wang. Using what he terms as the manufacturing renaissance model, the United States could see a surplus in manufactured good exports in 10-15 years. “We have a lot to do to move from research to production,” he explained. “We must have a new collaborative model. We must learn how to work together, and all the members must have a mutual trust.”

The day’s event included presentations and panel discussion on disruptive technologies such as lightweight composites and 3D printing, as well as manufacturing’s role in economic development.

Continuing on the concept that the U.S. innovation process takes too long, Dr. Satish Kumar, Professor with the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering, explained the time it took to reach the current state of the art in composite materials. “Polypropylene was discovered in 1933,” Dr. Kumar said. “But it took 30 years to realize that it could be crystalized to produce better mechanical properties, and it took 50 years for polypropylene to be commercialized.”

According to Dr. Kumar, the research trends in lightweight carbon fiber composites today include:

• low-density honeycomb structure composites,
• high strength and high modulus composites,
• alternative precursor materials,
• alternative processing methods, and
• structural and functional fibers.

The second disruptive technology discussion of the day focused on additive manufacturing. A topic so hot that Dr. Wang joked, “We have two or three resident experts here at Georgia Tech on additive manufacturing, but they are all traveling to talk about additive manufacturing.”

Dr. Wang identified four key areas for 3D printing application including aerospace, automotive, biomedical, repair and maintenance. This is especially useful for the military in terms of repair parts and reducing the inventory of parts required to be on hand for tours of duty.

Repair and maintenance was reiterated by the panel as well. Eric Amis, Director of Physical Sciences at the United Technologies Research Center, said, “Repair is one of the first places that we are using this for small parts production. There is a real opportunity where we can see the reduction of part counts.”

But no matter how promising, there are always challenges to be faced by new technologies. Some of the challenges noted by the panel include:

• difficulty in certifying parts
• surface finishes are not up to par and require post machining
• costly and timely post processing can take away the benefit of additive manufacturing
• reproducibility

The panel added, however, that these challenges provide great opportunities for collaborative, university-based research. The main areas of focus, Dr. Chuck Zhang noted, are new materials, new processes and machines, and certification.

Looking at the big picture of manufacturing, the third panel of the GTMI Symposium focused on manufacturing’s role in economic development and, as moderator Bob Pertierra, Vice President of Supply Chain and Advanced Manufacturing, Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, noted, “economic development’s role in manufacturing.” For, as this panel showed, it is a two-way street. Strong examples were provided for Newark, NJ, and Gwinnett County, GA, which are both making changes to their policies and strategies to both attract and grow manufacturing clusters within their regions. Again, the panel emphasized the idea that policy, whether local or national, needs to be part of the mix when building the manufacturing sector and the ecosystem needed to support it.

“From an economic standpoint,” said Green Leigh, “we have to remake our ‘Maker Economy.’ Today $11,500 per capita is spent in the U.S. toward imported goods. We simply can’t afford that if we are to help our economy. And although a 100 percent ‘Made in America’ plan doesn’t work in an advanced economy, we seriously need to rebalance where we are at this time.”