Industrial Innovation for Humanity

Happy 2025, everyone! It's a time for hope despite uncertainties and I wish everyone the best in every aspect of their lives in the year ahead. A year ago, there was no Industrial Innovation Advocate and I have kept it up for you all since last spring. It has been fascinating to learn with you about so many of the innovations that drive manufacturing and the industrial economy, growing out of my own experience at additive manufacturing company Stratasys .

Before I was at Stratasys, I spent much of my career at global communications agency 万博宣伟 , including an innovative communications startup brand that spun out from Weber called Current Global . One of the things I've been reminded of on this career journey in tech is that ultimately what matters is how it contributes to or detracts from humanity.

I led a global PR and brand-building program for IEEE a few years ago. IEEE is a global technical professional organization of engineers. While IEEE's areas of expertise are broad - we talked about everything from photovoltaics to the applications of graphene - their mission stands out - advancing technology to benefit humanity. Most of the IEEE engineers I spoke with - all of them world-class leaders in their fields - never lost sight of that. We shared stories about the Fukushima disaster and how robots were put to work to help ensure the stability of the site by going where humans could not. We talked about the potential for mobile solar panel trailers to bring energy to places where people didn't have it. We talked about how ideas for advancing neuroscience were more important than whether the people who had those ideas also had the right seniority or title.

When the pandemic hit at the beginning of 2020 (five years ago!), a team of us at Stratasys focused quickly on the issue of what we could do to help. Substantively, not just in a virtue-signaling way. We had tools at our disposal in the form of industrial 3D printing technology. On their own, they're just tools. We also had an incredible network of customers and partners. We listened to needs and we watched what others were doing. And we and others quickly discerned that a most pressing need was for personal protection equipment for front-line emergency workers. Demand had abruptly outstripped supply in dramatic fashion. It would take many weeks, maybe months, for traditional manufacturing methods to catch up because of the time to create tools and molds.

So our team started what was essentially a temporary non-profit producing face shields through a virtual network of of our own facilities along with customers and partners. The requirements were speed and cost effectiveness. Lives needed protecting now, and we didn't have unlimited resources. We had to quickly determine the right design, reach out to our network of partners and customers for their willingness to help, set up a planning tool to keep track of who was making how many shields and by when, ensure the warehouse could take incoming boxes of face shields and ship them where needed, get the word out to healthcare and other organizations on how to request them and make sure the whole thing worked consistently. In like two weeks. In the end:

• 150 organizations and companies participated in the "COVID Coalition" over a couple months.
• We collectively produced over 100,00 shields, providing an important bridge until injection molding was able to ramp up and take over
• 150 front-line organizations received face shields during the period.

Human necessity bred innovation.

I read a book in 2024 that some of you may be familiar with called "Freedom's Forge," which I learned about during an Additive Manufacturing Coalition DC Fly-In event. The book describes how American manufacturing leaders rallied to build "the arsenal of democracy that armed the Allies and defeated the Axis." Manufacturing technology innovation and process innovation both came out of a pressing challenge facing humanity.

In July 1940, with Britain trying to hold off an onslaught of German air attacks, U.S. manufacturing leaders were asked to contribute 2,000 planes a month to Britain on top of another 2,000 a month for the U.S. Army Air Corps. At the time, they were only producing about 550. Yet by 1942, the U.S. was producing about 5,100 every month - 324,750 over the course of the war. This was possible because there was a clear North Star that mattered to people, and the entrepreneurial zeal of everyone in all those industrial companies was unleashed to get to that destination. The urgency and strategic intent were clear, even if the specifics on how to get there had to be discovered along the way.

Obviously, everything isn't a crisis, but I believe that when we have a clear purpose and keep in mind technology's impact on people, we get better results. We work harder, we're more creative with our solutions, and we create more value.

I wish everyone both bold thinking and significant, hard-earned results in 2025 as we apply industrial innovations to our our needs for energy, transportation, safety, healthcare and more, as IEEE would say, to benefit humanity. Cheers!