October 4, 2016
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Council on Competitiveness, with partners QuesTek Innovations, LLC and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, traveled to Capitol Hill Tuesday to unveil a report detailing critical building blocks that can drive significant enhancements in America’s energy production, manufactured products and overall economy: advanced materials.
“The Council has worked on advanced materials issues for almost a decade,” said William Bates, Executive Vice President, U.S. Council on Competitiveness. “We continue to find that scaling up the manufacturing and application of advanced materials is vital to U.S. competitiveness.”
Leverage: Advanced Materials is the second sector study to come out of Phase 1 of the Council’s Energy and Manufacturing Competitiveness Partnership (EMCP). The report is based on a dialogue that was held at the U.S. Council on Competitiveness on April 12, 2016. The report release included a panel with representatives from the Council, QuesTek Innovations, LLC, Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
"Advanced materials are a key enabler to enhancing U.S. manufacturing competitiveness and ensuring its sustained growth by increasing products’ performance/durability and lowering their cost via improved energy efficiency,” said panel participant Aziz Asphahani, Chief Executive Officer, QuesTek Innovations, LLC. “This EMCP sector study on advanced materials offers clear recommendations for the design, development and deployment (the three “Ds” of novel advanced materials) at a faster pace and reduced cost." 
“Throughout our history, we have had materials describe eras in our development as a society, civilization and culture - i.e. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc.,” said Diran Apelian, Alcoa-Howmet Professor of Engineering, Metal Processing Institute, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “In the 21st Century, it is the Innovation age (or economy), which is enabled and fueled by advanced materials. For the United States to maintain its competitive advantage, we must invest in the engine that fuels the innovation economy: advanced materials. It is that simple.”
The robust conversations during the dialogue led to a set of recommendations that will feed into a larger EMCP paper and eventual action plan for the president-elect. These recommendations included:
- Develop a national knowledge platform to ensure that accurate, pedigreed, curated and easily accessible data are developed to support the creation, processing, modeling and manufacturing of advanced materials.
- Promote the uptake of more public private partnerships (PPP) between the national laboratory system and industry partners, small businesses and universities.
- Gather critical masses of materials experts into business groups or entities to work with materials technologies as a collective effort to combine distinct knowledge bases and spur unique funding opportunities.
- Dedicate area-specific pilot-plant facilities to collaborate with national laboratories, universities and small & medium-sized companies to accelerate deployment and decrease the commercialization time horizon for advanced materials.
- Address the skills gap in advanced materials and manufacturing sector by embracing an interdisciplinary approach to education that combines traditional materials science curricula with data science, modeling and simulation and computational sciences.
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U.S. Council on Competitiveness
The U.S. Council on Competitiveness is a nonpartisan leadership group of CEOs, university presidents, labor leaders and national laboratory directors working to ensure U.S. prosperity.
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