As manufacturing undergoes the revolutionary changes of the Digital Age, the people with the keenest leadership skills have taken up the charge to modernize the industry so that it leverages the cloud and Big Data and is connected and smart. Their success encourages the rest of the manufacturing world to follow.

To assemble this list of leaders...

Another area in which the AMO supports private industry is through taking a leading role in consortia, such as the Manufacturing Institutes that were set up to to give American companies a leg up in advanced areas such as clean energy , composite materials and chemical process intensification .

The idea behind these consortia is to create hubs...

John Hopkins, CEO, Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI) talks to Plastics News about workforce development in composites manufacturing and IACMI's role.

Since May 2015, in a portion of its WorldPort distribution center in Louisville, Kentucky, United Parcel Service has been operating a spare parts warehouse with no spare parts. Instead, the facility is stocked with ultrafast 3-D printers that can build up almost any plastic part that’s required, layer by layer by layer — and have it ready for UPS...

It's become conventional wisdom that the last 30 years have been a hotbed of innovation, but evidence suggests otherwise. As Robert Gordon explains in The Rise and Fall of American Growth , productivity growth peaked between 1920 and 1970 and has declined ever since. Economist Tyler Cowen calls this the Great Stagnation .

Part of the reason for...