LOWELL -- It's a tale of two fabrics.

The standard uniform catches fire and never stands a chance, burning completely through.

But the other flame-retardant uniform self-extinguishes the fire within a few seconds, resulting in a charred sleeve. This safer, lower cost, non-toxic material may end up saving soldiers and firefighters in the future.

The new leader of Manufacturing USA’s lightweighting institute, Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow (LIFT), seeks small manufacturers with big ideas.

When he spoke to IndustryWeek in June, Nigel Francis had spent all of 10 days as CEO of LIFT , the Detroit-based Manufacturing USA institute focused on lightweighting innovation. But Francis already...

An important question circling around manufacturing right now is how job shops and other producers will address the skills gap that is expected to hit the industry with a shortage of two million workers in the next ten years. Two proposed answers, not mutually exclusive, are robots and education.

At a recent seminar on robotization in...

Xerox Parc, the legendary research and development center, is probably best known to readers as the research lab that Steve Jobs visited in the late 1970s , getting his first glimpse at the graphical user interface concept he later made famous with the Mac. But Parc has been involved in plenty of other innovative research projects over the years —...

"Manufacturing is changing dramatically," said Emily DeRocco, the education and workforce director of Lightweight Innovations for Tomorrow, or LIFT . "We want young people to understand that there are actually exciting jobs available."

Her group is one of 14 "innovation institutes" aiming to bring government, industry, and academia together to...