In May, the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) marked its first anniversary with MIT Manufacturing Week, four days of events that attracted more than 800 registrants including students, faculty, industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and government officials to explore topics ranging from how companies are using AI on factory floors to the role of startups in introducing innovation to new workforce solutions to address the worker shortage.
“INM launched a year ago with the premise that strengthening the industrial base needed a coordinated response, and MIT has a responsibility to lead it,” says Paula T. Hammond, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering and co-chair of INM’s Steering Committee. “The response and participation level has been huge. MIT Manufacturing Week proved that the appetite for change — from students to chief executives — is real and urgent.”
The week opened with a cybersecurity workshop co-led by INM and Google Cloud for the initiative’s industry members. It continued with the MIT MIMO (Machine Intelligence for Manufacturing Operations) symposium focused on deploying artificial intelligence on factory floors, alongside discussions on workforce development, emerging technologies, startups, and industrial transformation. The week closed with a regional research showcase and competition that drew more than 140 graduate students and postdocs from across New England.
Over the past year, INM has also continued its distinguished speaker series featuring manufacturing leaders including Keith Flynn, senior vice president of manufacturing at Anduril; Roland Busch, president and CEO of Siemens; and Venky Alagirisamy, COO of Nike.
Inspiring a new generation of manufacturing startups
A central goal of INM is to help more students see manufacturing as a frontier for scientific discovery, technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and societal impact.
To support that effort, INM is launching and leading programs to help move early-stage ideas and new technologies from the lab to real-world development, and to catalyze new manufacturing companies.
This year, INM partnered with NSF I-Corps New England, which helps researchers turn their startup ideas into companies, to host its first manufacturing research showcase. More than 140 teams from 17 universities across New England applied to participate. Forty finalist teams received mentorship on their ideas and advanced to the final competition, where eight teams shared $50,000 in prize funding.
The top prize in the category “most transformative innovation” went to MIT PhD student Jake Read for “The End of G Code,” a project focused on modular machine control architectures designed to accelerate the development of new manufacturing equipment and processes. Vatsal Patel from MIT and Joshua Grace from Yale University won the top prize in the research excellence category, for “VisFT,” scalable six-axis force-torque sensors.
Project themes presented by participating teams included AI tools for manufacturing, semiconductor manufacturing and process control, robotics and autonomous assembly, digital twins and simulation, new materials, additive manufacturing, next-generation shipbuilding, and biomanufacturing.
“Entrepreneurship is a transformative pathway to take research to market, and to drive faster innovation and scale-up,” says John Hart, INM faculty co-director and head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “At INM’s inaugural research showcase, we had tremendous interest from universities across New England, along with enthusiastic participation from industry, investors, and experienced founders across the ecosystem. We are excited to build on this success and work toward a nationwide program and platform for entrepreneurship and translation in manufacturing.”
The Cheng Wu Foundation supported the showcase.
Growing industry membership
During MIT Manufacturing Week, First Solar became INM’s eighth industry member, joining Amgen, Autodesk, GE Vernova, Flex, PTC, Sanofi and Siemens.
The growth of INM’s consortium reflects a broader recognition that the challenges facing modern manufacturing — from supply chain resilience to workforce development and industrial competitiveness — are too complex for any single sector or company to address alone.
This reflects renewed interest in manufacturing at a moment when advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, energy systems, and advanced materials are transforming industrial production. INM provides a platform to convene and provide solutions.
INM’s industry consortium model brings industry, researchers, and educators together around shared manufacturing challenges, with a focus on emerging technologies, workforce transformation, and commercialization pathways. Members participate in workshops and working groups on topics including cybersecurity and digital twins, implementing automated systems, AI agents in regulatory environments, and AI and continuous innovation. INM helps them connect with students, meet with startups, and learn from one another.
“Our members see MIT as a partner that can help them both address today’s challenges and think far into the future,” says Rick Locke, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-chair of INM’s steering committee. “This kind of multi-industry engagement is unusual and powerful.”
A year of rapid progress
When MIT launched INM a year ago, the goal was to create stronger connections between research, industry, workforce development, and entrepreneurship — helping accelerate how new manufacturing technologies move from the laboratory into real-world development.
Since then, the initiative has expanded quickly across research, industry, workforce training, and student engagement. INM issued a call for proposals focused on artificial intelligence and automation, receiving an incredible response from faculty and researchers, and funding eight seed research projects. In June, the initiative plans to publish eight white papers as part of a broader study examining the future of manufacturing.
During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) in January 2026, INM collaborated with NSF I-Corps to guide 13 early-stage teams through customer discovery as part of the I-Corps Spark program.
Workforce development has also been a major focus. This fall, MIT launched the Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), led by Principal Research Scientist John Liu, to create a new generation of shop floor leaders and drivers of productivity — becoming“‘technologists” — at six sites across New England, including three community colleges.
“INM has the potential to transform the national manufacturing workforce,” says Liu. “It will require deep engagement between how people learn and lead, and how firms adopt new technologies and transform. We’re just getting started.”
INM is now exploring a national rollout of TechAMP, along with expansion into areas including biomanufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing.
On campus, INM supported student engagements including an AI and automation lunch series that Professor Faez Ahmed and colleagues organized, and visited factories through its Factory Observatory program that Ben Armstrong and the MIT Industrial Performance Center led. This spring, students also founded MIT’s first manufacturing club, holding its launch event during MIT Manufacturing Week. “We’re thrilled students are taking the lead,” says Sloan associate professor and INM faculty co-director Karen Zheng. “It was really exciting to see a full room of 80-plus students across campus coming together for the kickoff event during the busiest final period of a semester. This speaks to the students’ enthusiasm.”
An eye toward the long term
While maintaining a deep focus on strengthening domestic manufacturing, INM aims to have a global reach. For example, the initiative is collaborating with NAMTECH, a new education institute in Ahmedabad, India, where students are now taking an adaptation of MIT’s well-known “yo-yo course,” or 2.008 (Design and Manufacturing II), focused on the fundamentals of manufacturing processes.
Next year, INM plans to bring more manufacturing leaders to campus, offer additional programming for emerging entrepreneurs, graduate the first cohort of TechAMP students, bring TechAMP to new states, grow the consortium to include new industries, and deepen research into manufacturing productivity.
“INM aims to be a catalyst for transforming manufacturing across the nation to drive innovation, economic growth, and new types of jobs,” says Chris Love, faculty co-director of INM. “MIT’s work on the PIE (Production in the Innovation Economy) study in 2013 highlighted the value of proximity between production and innovation. INM seeks to rekindle this relationship in manufacturing across the country.”
