Federal, Corporate Grants to Fund Manufacturing Technology

A new public-private partnership will deliver $4.5 million in grant funding to help small- and medium-sized manufacturers in the U.S. Midwest make better use of advanced digital technology. The grants include $2 million from the U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA) and $2.5 million from private-sector, state, and institutional partners.

The partners providing the $2.5 million in matching funds include Purdue University, General Electric, John Deere, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, and the State of Ohio.

EDA awarded the grant to the Council on Competitiveness — a group of CEOs, university presidents, and labor leaders advancing economic growth –- to form the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium. The Consortium will use the funding to develop software, purchase time on supercomputers, and train small- and medium-sized manufacturers in the use of this technology that can help the companies design their own advanced manufacturing processes and products.

The initiative is expected to involve close collaboration with original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers of these companies, to encourage the use of high-performance computing among both OEMs and their supply-chain partners in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. The goal of the initiative is to foster collaboration between large manufacturing firms and their small- and medium-sized supply chain manufacturers to offer advanced manufacturing modeling and simulation resources to speed up the design cycle and provide realistic simulations of final products.

Read more: Report: Tech Industry Clusters Help Build Regional Economies

Photo: kosheahan/Flickr

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