AMCC and NIST Joint Town Hall: National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing
Thanks to our partner’s at NIST for co-creating a great RFI session on Monday’s extended version of the AMCC weekly national call! We are grateful for your teamwork and commitment to improving the American Project! And critically, thanks to all of you who showed up to learn more and add your experienced take as to challenges you see and opportunities we have to build a national strategy bold enough to produce the structural changes that can produce the bottom-up teamwork necessary to produce priority products at speed and scale.
OUR NATION NEEDS YOUR INPUT! AMCC’s Draft RFI Response is here to spur your thinking, with topline recommendations below. Feel free to use and/or modify any of our draft ideas as your own. After hearing from more of you about our draft and otherwise, we intend to finalize and submit our AMCC comments by the September 30 deadline. Let’s do it!
General Input #1: Produce Priority Products
The National Strategy should center on producing priority products at the speed and scale the nation requires, as this focus is essential to mobilizing stakeholder collaboration and meeting broader goals like national security and economic growth. To do so, it should clearly define critical manufacturing industries, such as defense, energy, transportation, agriculture, IT/communications, and health/life sciences, and establish a process for identifying priority subsectors within each. This approach will better align manufacturers and their regional support ecosystems around shared objectives for national and regional success.
General Input #2: Demand Improved Ecosystem-of-Support Performance
In addition to identifying priority product areas, the new National Strategy must acknowledge that producing these products depends not just on manufacturers and their workers, but also on the strength of the regional ecosystems that support them. The Strategy should prioritize improving collaboration across the Big 6 areas described in the MCEM project by engaging public, private, and non-profit stakeholders using increasingly better open-source AI-infused tools and playbooks. To drive this coordination, the federal government should adopt and support single and ideally multi-agency bottom-up approaches informed by proven public-private partnership models like DoD’s Defense Manufacturing Community Support Program.
General Input #3: Demand Public-Private Integration and Structural Reforms
To protect American economic and national security in the face of rising global threats, the U.S. must transform its manufacturing capabilities with greater speed and coordination. Given the decentralized nature of our government, the National Strategy should establish a stronger, federally-supported but regionally-led structure to align public, private, and non-profit collaboration around manufacturing priority products. AMCC titles these: Manufacturing Collaboration Centers (MCCs); hub-and-spoke models that unite regional coordination efforts where siloed federal interventions are braided together into regionally-relevant strategies and operational activities. MCCs should be empowered with tools to guide strategic interventions and identify ecosystem gaps. A central role should be played by expanding the every-state NIST MEP network, whose professionals have trusted relationships with small and midsize manufacturers in every state. To ensure better results, MCCs should be empowered to overcome persistent regional barriers to producing priority products across Big 6 ecosystem-of-support areas.
General Input #4: Create and Integrate a “Manufacturing Corps”
To support the success of regional Manufacturing Collaboration Centers (MCCs), the National Strategy should call for establishing a Regional Manufacturing Corps (RMC) to train and deploy the next generation of manufacturing systems leaders. This multi-year service program would place young Americans in MCCs, where they would receive technical training, mentorship, and hands-on experience contributing to regional projects aligned with national manufacturing priorities. In addition to advancing the MCC mission, Corps members would help unify stakeholders, identify bottlenecks, and strengthen local ecosystems-of-support. The program should offer participants robust post-service benefits while creating pathways to prosperity and national service for manufacturing revitalization.
