Rebuilding American manufacturing
A cohort of leading engineers, scientists, business executives and government officials gathered at MIT on Monday for a daylong forum, part of a White House initiative with an ambitious goal: turning America’s abundant laboratory advances into new technologies that will jump-start the U.S. economy. The meeting was part of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), created by President Barack Obama in June, which will deliver specific policy recommendations on manufacturing industries to the administration next spring. The meeting was the second of four regional workshops intended to stimulate interest in and promote local connections around a prospective renaissance in American manufacturing.AMP’s premise is that there exists a substantial “innovation gap,” as many forum participants called it, in which not enough of the country’s research discoveries move on to form the basis of viable businesses. Helping those innovations move into the marketplace could strengthen the nation’s manufacturing sector and reverse the sector’s...