President Obama last week awarded $70 million to the University of California, Los Angeles, to launch a Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute that will spur digitized, energy-efficient, sensor-driven manufacturing in five regional hubs, promising academic institutions a robust new role in the U.S. economic landscape.
Incorporating more than 200 partners across industry, academia and the nonprofit sector, the institute aims to disrupt a dated, inefficient manufacturing sector—currently the source of one-third of America’s energy use—through cutting-edge technology that will lower costs, reduce emissions and unlock a generation of job growth while bringing greater diversity to the field of technology development.
“Like the banking and financial industry, like the transportation industry with Uber, and like the health care industry that changed with mass digitization, we’re talking about the same kind of transformation: digitizing the manufacturing process,” said Jim Davis, Vice Provost of Information Technology at UCLA and interim executive director of the institute.
The goal: to increase manufacturing efficiency by 15 percent and energy productivity by 50 percent. “If you save energy at those kinds of levels, it translates directly into environmental impact and significant gains in the way we consume energy,” he said.
Likewise, the institute, which is receiving an additional $70 million in matching private funds, will “pay a lot of attention to developing a diverse workforce from all levels of college, including community colleges, bringing in [graduates] and getting them ready for data-centered next-generation IT jobs,” Davis added.
“Lots of people work in information technology, but there’s a shortage in diversity, and there’s room to build that up. We’ll focus on manufacturing and opening up jobs in those sectors, [because] when you look at where the plants are located, you really want to tap into the workforce in that particular area.”
A coalition of universities sits at the core of the project—a joint venture between the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition and the Department of Education—which President Obama introduced June 20 at the third annual SelectUSA Summit in Washington, D.C.
