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NARRATOR: Materials, the basic building blocks that make up so
much of what we depend on every day. Advanced materials will
fuel emerging industries, and they're key to addressing some
of society's greatest challenges.
CYRUS WADIA: Everything from eradicating extreme poverty to
improving human health and welfare across the globe, to
combating climate change by way of clean energy. These are all
the challenges where advanced materials will most certainly
play a role.
NARRATOR: The problem is time.
CYRUS WADIA: Right now, after you've discovered a material, it
takes twenty years to get that new material,
post discovery, to market.
BARACK OBAMA: We can do it faster. To help businesses
discover, develop and deploy new materials twice as fast, we're
launching what we call the Materials Genome Initiative.
CYRUS WADIA: The mantra of the Materials Genome Initiative is:
Twice as fast, and half the cost. We believe that
manufacturing is a gateway for further economic growth and
the improvement of our middle class. We want to focus heavily
on, not what manufacturing used to look like, but what
manufacturing will look like. The Material Genome Initiative
was designed to put us at the frontier of this intersection
between materials and manufacturing.
NARRATOR: How can we more quickly understand and
manipulate materials?
CYRUS WADIA: How do we innovate faster? How do we make sure we
have the right tools? How do we make sure that we are
provisioning the right skills to our labor force to use those
tools? This is what the Materials Genome is about.
NARRATOR: Today, there are gaps in our infrastructure.
CYRUS WADIA: That's everything from discovery to manufacturing,
and the Materials Genome Initiative has been designed to
bring those pieces together. In our first three years we have
deployed resources on the order of hundreds of millions of
dollars, that's across five federal agencies. These
resources have gone to hundreds of different Universities and
companies alike. This year as we celebrate the 3rd year
anniversary of this Initiative we're launching a $150 million
expansion to deliver new domestic capabilities in
advanced materials. This is going to provide a strong
foundation for continued US leadership.
NARRATOR: The Initiative is also inspiring a cultural shift.
CYRUS WADIA: We've created this Materials Genome Initiative to
encourage and bring entities that weren't talking as much
before, to begin talking, sharing resources and building
true public/private partnership collaborations. And it's quite
exciting to see companies and universities and professional
societies and national labs all come to the table wanting to
participate. Companies coming to us and saying, "What can we
do to help?" And, as a result, what you're seeing is a
Materials Genome community formed, and this is really going
to be the community that drives the paradigm shift for how we do
discovery through deployment of advanced materials from
here on out.
NARRATOR: The pace at which we innovate new technologies, new
goods, and solve society's challenges is
only getting faster.
CYRUS WADIA: We need materials, everything from raw material
feedstock to a finished product that uses the material to happen
along that same time scale. Through the Materials Genome
Initiative researchers are accelerating discoveries of new
materials and working with our manufacturing sector to figure
out how to bring those materials to market faster.
NARRATOR: It's all sparking a new era in materials innovation,
setting a new pace and bearing fruit.
CYRUS WADIA: We've seen success, we're scaling that
success, and we're looking ahead to how we can use this
Initiative to bring the stakeholders together, that we
need to address society's grand challenges. From discovery,
through development, through manufacturing and beyond. New
advanced materials are a central part of America's manufacturing
enterprise. Through them we create innovation, jobs, and the
products of the future.
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