Launching the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing
Dear members of the MIT community,
From the start of my time here, I’ve focused on helping the people of MIT find new ways to do big things together, accelerating our progress and increasing our impact through a suite of presidential initiatives.
Today, I’m pleased to add an initiative that builds on ideas as old as MIT: the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing.
Why manufacturing at MIT?
Frankly, it’s not too much to say that the Institute was founded in 1861 to make manufacturing better. MIT’s first president, William Barton Rogers, was explicitly focused on creating a school that would help accelerate America's industrialization, and central to that vision was manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of hands-on leaders he designed MIT to train.
Since then, a vital part of MIT’s strength and impact has sprung from the passion for understanding, optimizing and educating our students about a wide range of complex, real-world systems: things like data centers, communications, transportation and logistics, and nuclear energy. Systems that most people take for granted but that are absolutely critical to making our world run. Systems we really miss when they’re weakened or broken.
Systems like manufacturing.
Emerging more strongly at some times than others, manufacturing has been a throughline in MIT’s research and education and an essential part of our service to the nation.
You can learn more from MIT News about the Institute's important contributions to U.S. manufacturing – and about the purpose and structure of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing.
Why now?
Building on this legacy – and in response to urgent, widespread national interest in restoring America’s manufacturing strength – in 2022, an inspired group of MIT faculty came together to create the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. The aim was to explore new ways to marshal MIT’s expertise in technology, the social sciences and management to build an intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization.
Three of those faculty members – John Hart, Chris Love and Suzanne Berger – gathered and developed the ideas behind the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) and are serving as inaugural faculty co-directors. I’m immensely grateful to them for their vision, perseverance and service to the Institute. INM is continuing to build its leadership team and forming a faculty steering committee with membership from all five schools and the college.
What does INM aim to do?
Relying on MIT’s strengths in research, education and innovation, INM is an ambitious effort to drive transformation by making manufacturing more productive, more resilient and more sustainable.
We want to work with firms big and small – in cities, small towns and everywhere in between – to help them adopt new approaches for increased productivity. We want to deliberately design high-quality, human-centered manufacturing jobs that bring new life to communities across the country. To expand the talent pool, we want to re-elevate manufacturing in MIT’s own curriculum, and we want to provide pathways for people outside MIT to gain the skills to transform their own prospects and fuel a “new manufacturing” economy.
We also want to reimagine and develop automation- and AI-driven manufacturing solutions to advance fields like energy production, health care, computing, transportation, consumer products and more. And we want to reach well beyond the shop floor to tackle challenges like how to make supply chains more resilient, and how to inform public policy to foster a broad, healthy manufacturing ecosystem that can drive decades of innovation and growth.
INM has attracted an impressive list of founding industry members across a range of sectors including Amgen, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens. Already, INM has commissioned a set of white papers from MIT faculty to capture core challenges and opportunities in the field; as the initiative grows, we plan to offer further options for funding new research and to launch other major programs. As INM gets up and running, there will be multiple opportunities for community members to learn more about how to engage.
In the words of MIT’s landmark “Made in America” study, “To live well, a nation must produce well.” Helping to build a future of new manufacturing is a perfect job for MIT – and I’m convinced there’s no more important work we can do to meet the moment and serve the nation now.
Sincerely,
Sally Kornbluth
President