3 Stories About Addressing Big Problems

I'm excited to see qualified metal AM parts being delivered for submarines in the U.S. Also encouraged to see the potential for some innovation to address the gap between the skilled manufacturing workers we need and how our educational system currently tries to meet that need. And read on to understand how the seemingly intractable problems behind these stories are what make them so compelling.

Additively Manufactured Submarine Parts Delivered to U.S. Navy

Curtiss-Wright EMS Division has delivered the first submarine component with an additively manufactured impeller from component manufacturer Sintavia . The impeller was assembled into the pump and tested at Curtiss-Wright's facility in Bethlehem, Penn.

The U.S. Navy has made adoption of 3D printing for its submarine program a critical priority. At the Additive Manufacturing Strategies Conference early this year in New York, the U.S. Navy's Matthew Sermon, Executive Director at Program Executive Office Strategic Submarines, said they have a goal to have 10% 3D-printed parts (primarily metal, as with this impeller) in their nuclear submarines. A partnership between ASTM International , ship builder Austal USA , and BlueForge Alliance aims to create a robust and secure AM system that ensures the production of both new parts and through-life spare parts, ensuring the Navy's technical requirements are met.

Sintavia runs 25 high-production industrial printers across its production facilities, including an array of laser PBF systems and three ARCAM EBM systems, with a focus on lean manufacturing principles. That attention to process is essential to mainstream AM applications even as it isn't as sexy as talking about new materials and technology.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Urges Revamped Approach to Workforce Development

In an editorial published Nov. 24, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette says there is too little communications, coordination and collaboration between the institutions that train people for new jobs and the people who employ them, with the result being little progress in closing the jobs gap between what's needed for manufacturing innovators like Re:Build Manufacturing (heading toward a shortfall of million) and the workers available. A new grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation could help change that dynamic.

The Richard King Mellon Foundation is seeking to address this problem by offering a significant grant to a consortium of organizations that would work together to design and deploy a workforce development system, within the Pittsburgh marketplace, that would be responsive to the distinctive needs of emerging industries

In particular, the newspaper's editorial board is hoping for a renewed focus on apprenticeships. They praise this approach for shifting some costs from the trainee to the company that will benefit from the new worker's development. They also note that these programs are often much better at exposing people to new advanced manufacturing technologies being adopted in their communities that they may not get exposed to in a traditional technical education setting.

There's a great salary pay-off too: An $80,000 starting salary following apprenticeship program completion, vs. a $56k average salary for bachelor's degree grads.

Stories of Big Challenges Meeting Big Solutions

Over the last year or two, I've tried to be as engaged with the Twin Cities start-up community as my schedule can reasonably accommodate, and as a result, I have listening to scores of pitches and demos. What comes through every time is passion and enthusiasm from the founders for their business. I am in awe of their courage and determination. But that also means enthusiasm is simply table stakes for attracting interest from prospective customers or investors.

What catches my attention first is a timely, frustrating problem to solve that people care about, ideally communicated in the context of a real person's story. Then I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for your solution, presented with minimal acronyms and jargon and just enough detail that this isn't just an idea but something kind of novel.

Equip made Forbes' list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups this year, and it's worth reading the full blog post on why Erin Parks, Ph.D. co-founded the company. Early in her career she found herself totally sold by the evidence-based approach to eating disorders at the UC San Diego Eating Disorders Center. Their "secret sauce" is a collaborative multi-disciplinary team, focus on the present (not the past), teaching skills to patients AND care-givers, and valuing treatment that works more than treatment that feels good.

The problem is Dr. Parks met too many families who had been through too many proliferating private programs that gave them a feel good buzz at the beginning, ultimately didn’t work and drove them into financial hardship. Tragic and infuriating. But those ineffective private programs continued to spread and when they didn’t work, they blamed the patient for not being motivated enough!

With the exponential increase in privately-owned treatment centers, patients and their parents were conned into spending their money on treatment that felt good--but that ultimately didn’t work.

So Dr. Parks created Equip for the patients who don’t live near a program like UCSD's but want an evidence-based program that is tough but works. In 2019 they built their first collaborative care, 100% telehealth program, right before COVID. Today this company has contracts with 25 insurers, has successfully treated 5,000 patients, and raised $110 million to fight back against eating disorder treatments that don’t work.

Consider the other stories I highlighted this week. We're going to be a million people short of the skilled manufacturing workers we'll need in the U.S. and we need to do something different. We need to make far more submarines than we have been but our industrial capacity demands a new approach. These are big motivating problems that attract big compelling solutions. Let's share them!