This is a story about #manufacturing competitiveness in the US.
About the Manufacturing USA initiative.
About the MxD innovation center in #Chicago (formerly known as DMDII).
And, about my frustrations that have festered for some time.
Out of respect for some of the people that I know personally that were employed there (who I will not name), this is a story that I had kept to myself for some time.
But now it is time to share, for a variety of reasons.
During the early years of the #Obama Administration, there were deep concerns over #China's outsized and entrenched role as being the "World's Factory Floor" and, more than that, their Made In China 2025 ambitions which was designed to springboard off that existing dominance into a spectrum of future manufacturing technologies like advanced automation, #robotics and #AI.
To say the least, the Obama Administration's concerns were very much ahead of the curve back then.
Manufacturing USA (initially called NAMII) was established in 2012.
Constructed in the image of the #Germany's #Fraunhofer Society, Manufacturing USA was to be a collection of "innovation institutes" scattered throughout the US with a lofty goal to boost American competitiveness and significantly move the needle away from #China.
One of the first institutes launched was the MxD in Chicago... an institute dedicated to supporting the development of "digital #manufacturing" technologies.
It is important to note that #China has long and substantially subsidized their #manufacturing industry. China has also exercised a considerable degree of central state planning and control... some of which, like #battery and #ElectricVehicle production and its associated supply chain development, are paying dividends today.
The US is not really structured for that, well, politically.
So, the institutes embrace a common approach - the public-private partnership.
On paper, the institutes were supposed to primarily help small #manufacturing businesses by substantially subsidizing research and development - which is uniquely costly and risky in the physical hardware space.
And the MxD institute had, in the beginning, some great and unique ideas... or so I thought.
In practice, what followed, was a total collapse of its lofty goals.
I believe that this collapse has two parts, the first which will be covered in this thread.
The very first initiative of MxD, and what drew me to it, was in their pursuit of cultivating an #OpenSource software culture in the #manufacturing space - a deceptively difficult task.
I agreed to get involved as an outside contributor, quite enthusiastically.
Admittedly, my interest here was not so much the platform itself (more on that in the "Part 2" thread), but in the open-source software culture that I believe needs to be brought increasingly into manufacturing.
It would be good to get something going, I thought.
General Electric, one of the headline "founders" of the MxD institute had recently launched its "GE Digital" division and was aggressively pursuing an "Amazon Web Services, but for manufacturers" strategy via their GE Predix product.
GE Predix was, well, an "App Store" for manufacturing applications... in large part.
GE Predix was to be a commercial product and the cornerstone of GE's future business to which it invested billions.
While the Predix product was being aggressively developed at GE Digital's shiny new headquarters in San Ramon, California...
The MxD institute effectively gave all would-be resources to GE Research to steward the Digital Manufacturing Commons open-source project where it was actively undercut in endless bureaucracy and, what I regard as, active sabatoge.
The MxD institute had software developers on staff that I can vouch for personally that were sidelined.
So, that messiness was at the "platform level" of Digital Manufacturing Commons.
Other fault lines emerged at the "app level".
Siemens, PTC and Microsoft were also founding members or top-tier members of the MxD institute and they had proprietary "apps" of their own to sell to small manufacturers - an untapped, lucrative market in their minds.
Why would Microsoft support the creation of, say, an open-source Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) app that would compete with their product?
And, after a few years of active sabotage and numerous sloppy rewrites of the institute's mission... the internal MxD employees tasked that were dedicated to developing the Digital Manufacturing Commons and being developer advocates to the community were unceremoniously canned.
What a waste of time and money.
But GE Research got its money worth from it, I suppose.
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