Protolabs, the world's leading provider of digital manufacturing services, today announced a grant to support research fellows at the MIT Industrial Performance Center as they study leading U.S. manufacturing innovators and identify what it takes to scale the nation's most advanced technologies.

The U.S. leads the world in developing breakthrough technologies from new aircrafts to medical technologies, but manufacturers still face significant challenges when bringing those innovations to large-scale production. The research will examine the strategies, capabilities and conditions that can help U.S. manufacturers turn American innovation into domestic production at scale, strengthening the U.S. economy and national security.

"We feel that there is significant momentum to transform American manufacturing through innovation and entrepreneurship," said Ben Armstrong, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center.

"We want to thank Protolabs for their support to study how American aerospace and medical companies innovate and scale up faster. For decades, inventors who started to build their companies in the U.S. moved production abroad as they grew. We are seeing growing demand for companies to scale up new technologies in the U.S., but there is not yet an obvious path for doing so. With this support from Protolabs, we're focusing on today's manufacturing pioneers that are finding ways to scale in the U.S. and we're hoping to identify operating models, financial strategies, and public policies that can strengthen America's industrial base for the long-term."

The grant will enable the Industrial Performance Centre to develop a manufacturing innovation index and advance the Initiative for New Manufacturing's research programme on high-growth manufacturing companies.

"Protolabs is at the centre of American innovation, especially in critical industries like aerospace and medical devices," said Suresh Krishna, President and CEO of Protolabs. "Protolabs pioneered rapid product development through the use of technology-enabled software, and needs to focus now, more than ever, on developing and deploying physical AI to scale up the American manufacturing and supply chain ecosystem."

The manufacturing innovation index is a first-of-its-kind research endeavour to measure the changing market for manufactured products, tracking new and emerging manufacturing companies, the products they are developing and the technologies and techniques they use to make them.

The Initiative for New Manufacturing's research programme will identify how American factories can transform their operations to boost productivity, drive innovation and adapt to changing employment landscape in manufacturing. Support from Protolabs will enable the Initiative's research fellows to study factories at the frontier of the aerospace, defence and medical device industries and identify practices that can help strengthen American manufacturing more broadly.