At its annual Members Meeting and Exchange last week, America Makes, the nonprofit additive manufacturing (AM) center headquartered in Youngstown, Ohio, announced a strategic partnership with the AM Coalition. The latter organization is a Washington, D.C.-based, 501(c)(6) tax-exempt business association, which advises the federal government on issues related to the AM sector.
Among other details of the collaboration, America Makes plans to help sponsor and otherwise facilitate AM Coalition educational programs, as well as other industry-related events. Additionally, AM Coalition will help America Makes formulate communication strategies so that America Makes can maximize its outreach to potential commercial and governmental partners.
According to a press release, the primary aim of the partnership is to coordinate information concerning the industry, in order to also synchronize advisory efforts made to the government on behalf of the sector’s major stakeholders. Of course, that consideration will become increasingly important to industry leaders going forward. After nearly a decade of gradually building up its interest in the technology, the US federal government has only continued to increase, and broaden, its support of AM this year.
In addition to the Biden administration’s oft-mentioned AM Forward initiative, a range of US government agencies, from military branches to the Department of Energy (DOE), seem to have been funneling more public money than ever into the industry in 2022. In that sense, it can be expected that there will be more resource-sharing amongst nonprofits and the like, such as the partnership announced by America Makes and the AM Coalition. And, although it didn’t happen in this case, it’s likely that there will also be more mergers between research and advisory institutions, etc, parallel to the mergers happening in the industry, itself.
Similarly to the AM Forward initiative, which both of the institutions mentioned in the present post are vocal proponents of, news of this type of partnership can be taken as yet another signal that the sector is not only scaling up, but standardizing. Once it truly start to take shape, the sector’s standardization will likely happen increasingly quickly, as standardization related to anything digital seems to be something of a self-replicating process. This means that organizations such as America Makes and the AM Coalition are positioned to disproportionately benefit from the first big scale-up for the sector, simply from being so early to the party.
Images courtesy of America Makes