Manufacture NY and FIT partner to bring revolutionary textile innovation to New York
The partnership, named Advanced Functional Fibers of America (AFFOA), has won a national competition for federal funding to create the latest Manufacturing Innovation Institute. It is designed to accelerate innovation in high-tech, U.S.-based manufacturing involving fibers and textiles. This is the eighth Manufacturing Innovation Institute established to date, and the first to be headquartered in the Northeast. The headquarters will be established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in proximity to the MIT campus. . .The new initiative will receive $75 million in federal funding out of a total of $317 million though cost sharing among the Department of Defense, industrial partners, venture capitalists, and state government funding. The funding will cover a five-year period and will be administered through the new, independent, nonprofit organization set up for the purpose. The partnership, which will focus on both developing new technologies and training the workforce needed to operate and maintain these production systems, also includes a network of community colleges and professional development institutes.
Manufacture New York Blossoms in Brooklyn
Last month, MNY became part of the U.S. Department of Defense and Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s sweeping $315 million public-private project called the Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles Manufacturing Innovation Institute aimed at keeping the country at the forefront of fiber and textiles innovation. It will be located at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge.
Under the banner Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, the consortium comprises firms from several industries and fields, including fashion groups VF Corp., New Balance and Nike and textile manufacturers Milliken & Co., Buhler Quality Yarns and Inman Mills. The project also encompasses 52 companies and 32 universities, colleges and other schools, including the Fashion Institute of Technology.
This sounds like it may be related to this DoD project:
Headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, ARMI is part of continuing efforts to help revitalize American manufacturing and incentivize companies to invest in new technology development in the United States. The highly competitive process resulted in ARMI’s selection to lead the Advanced Tissue Biofabrication (ATB) Manufacturing USA Institute. The award of $80 million in federal funding will be combined with over $214 million contributed by the winning consortium, made up of industry, state and local governments, universities, community colleges, and non-profit organizations located across the country. The ATB institute, with founding industrial and academic partners in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Texas, California, Colorado, Washington, Arizona, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland, seeks to organize the current fragmented domestic capabilities in tissue biofabrication technology and better position the U.S. relative to global competition.
Biofabrication is an innovative manufacturing industry segment at the intersection of biology-related research, computer science, materials science and engineering that is creating state-of-the-art manufacturing innovations in biomaterial and cell processing, bioprinting, automation and non-destructive testing technologies for critical Department of Defense and novel commercial use. ARMI, Inc. will integrate the diverse and fragmented collection of industry practices and institutional knowledge across many disciplines to realize the potential of a robust biofabrication manufacturing ecosystem. Technologies ripe for significant evolution within the ATB institute include, but are not limited to, high-throughput culture technologies, 3D biofabrication technologies, bioreactors, storage methodologies, non-destructive evaluation, real-time monitoring/sensing, and detection technologies.
ATB joins the Manufacturing USA institute network which is a bipartisan program that brings together industry, academia, and government to co-invest in the development of world-leading manufacturing technologies and capabilities. Each Manufacturing USA institute focuses on a technology area critical to future competitiveness—such as 3D printing, integrated photonics, or smart sensors. Across the Manufacturing USA institutes, the federal government has committed $860 million, which has been matched by $1.8 billion in non-federal investment. Together, the Manufacturing USA institutes are already enhancing U.S. competitiveness in advanced manufacturing—from helping Youngstown, OH attract over $90 million in new manufacturing investments to its region and train 14,000 workers in the fundamentals of 3D printing for businesses, to supporting companies like X-FAB in Lubbock, Texas, upgrade to cost-competitive, next-generation semiconductors and sustain hundreds of jobs.
The ATB Manufacturing USA institute includes:
Forty-seven industrial partners, including Abbott, Autodesk, Becton Dickinson, Celularity, DEKA Research & Development, GenCure, Humacyte, Lonza, Medtronic, Rockwell Automation, and United Therapeutics.
Twenty-six academic and academically affiliated partners, including Arizona State University, Boston University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers, Stanford University, the University of Florida, the University of Minnesota, the University of New Hampshire, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Yale University.
Fourteen government and nonprofit partners, including FIRST, the State of New Hampshire, and manufacturing extension partnerships in multiple states.
So the entity involved in the Manufacture New York project (called the Manufacture Foundation) is a "charity" in the broad sense of being a nonprofit, but the grant they received is oriented towards research and development, to be more precise. Which is fine in itself, but when their CEO organizes this type of protest activity, it raises an eyebrow about whether DoD should be giving money to this type of group.
Thank you! It does make some sense if it’s going to be used for our troops. I don’t know how you manage to keep up with the fire hose of facts you deal with! I really appreciate what you do.