America Makes, the public-private partnership that the Obama administration set up to foster research and innovation in additive manufacturing, achieved a significant milestone late last year: an online portal to track gaps in additive manufacturing (AM) standards.

There’s a bit of Rob Podoloff in every Dr. Scholl’s Custom Fit Kiosk for foot orthotics: The chief technology officer at Tekscan Inc. is a pioneer in flexible force-sensing resistors (FSRs).

U.S. manufacturing in general, and small- and medium-sized manufacturers in particular, are in danger of being left behind as Europe and Asia move faster toward Industry 4.0, John Dyck, CEO of the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), told congressional staff, federal agency staff in a February briefing.

Until 2014, Delta Airlines often had little warning before an airplane airframe experienced a maintenance issue requiring additional ground time, resulting in delayed or canceled flights.

Blockchain, the distributed, encrypted, tamper-evident ledger platform that gave rise to Bitcoin, has birthed a new, foundational market concept to execute business transactions, Karim Lakhani, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, said as he led a panel talk on blockchain tech for supply chains at Automate 2019.

As manufacturing undergoes the revolutionary changes of the Digital Age, the people with the keenest leadership skills have taken up the charge to modernize the industry so that it leverages the cloud and Big Data and is connected and smart.