An intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization

This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative—building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America’s industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission—a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of hands-on leaders Rogers designed MIT to train.

In the 1980s, the Institute’s “Made in America” study opened with the enduring observation “To live well, a nation must produce well.” Along with The Machine That Changed the World, the 1990 book that told the story of “lean production,” this landmark report helped US manufacturers understand and successfully compete with Japan’s quality model. 

Then, a little over a decade ago, MIT’s “Production in the Innovation Economy” initiative highlighted the opportunities we miss if design and manufacturing teams are miles or even oceans apart—and played a significant role in shaping the nation’s Advanced Manufacturing Initiative.

Building on this legacy, and in response to an urgent national interest in restoring America’s manufacturing strength, an inspired group of MIT faculty came together in 2022 to found the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. They explored new ways to marshal MIT’s expertise in technology, the social sciences, and management to forge an intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization.

As a result of this group’s foundational work, we’ve now created the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM),which will join the ranks of our other Presidential Initiatives—all designed to help the people of MIT come together in new ways to accelerate our progress and increase our impact. 

To help make manufacturing more productive, resilient, and sustainable, we aim to do the following:

 -Work with firms big and small to help them adopt new approaches for increased productivity.

  -Design high-quality, human-centered jobs that bring new life to communities across the country. 

  -Re-elevate manufacturing in MIT’s own curriculum—and provide pathways for people outside MIT to gain the skills to transform their own prospects and fuel a “new manufacturing” economy.

  -Reimagine manufacturing technologies and systems to advance fields like energy production, health care, computing, transportation, consumer products, and more. 

  -Tackle such challenges as making supply chains more resilient and informing public policy to foster a broad, healthy manufacturing ecosystem that can drive decades of innovation and growth.

If all this sounds ambitious—it is. And these are just the highlights! But I’m convinced that there is no more important work we can do right now to meet the moment and serve the nation.