The Commerce Department is moving forward with its “National Innovation Marketplace” program run by the Manufacturing Extension Partnership. The program, currently in a pilot phase, will be brought “up to scale” to help manufacturers “figure out what new products they can make and to whom they can sell them,” according to Jared Bernstein, executive director of the Middle Class Task Force and Vice President Joseph Biden’s chief economist. The program “helps connect suppliers who have often depended on one customer for years or decades, to large manufacturers in new industries who can become their customers of the future.”
The program “isn’t huge, but it doesn’t have to be huge,” said Biden when announcing the program in Ohio on June 23. “We are trying to rewrite” the manufacturing story from one of job loss to being “one of the strongest and most competitive in the world. That is the premise from which we start. There is no reason why we can’t capture global market share” in a number of new industries, from solar, to nanotechnology, medical equipment and robotics, he said. “There is no reason why we can’t produce these platforms for economic growth in the 21st Century.”
The National Innovation Marketplace, aimed at helping small manufacturing companies turn inventions into products, is located at www.planeteureka.org/marketplace.
Meanwhile, MEP director Roger Kilmer has been appointed by Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to lead a new initiative to streamline the agency’s programs that provide services to American industry. The initiative “will provide a single point of contact for every Commerce program available to business owners and will work with state and local agencies, academia, labor and other key stakeholders to provide a unified, integrated resource to grow and sustain jobs,” says Locke. Kilmer is responsible for staffing the initiative with a team from across all of Commerce’s agencies. The goal will be to create a pilot office in Detroit that will allow companies to access expertise in intellectual property protection, access to capital, export promotion and process improvement. Main Street businesses shouldn’t have to hire their own consultant to navigate the federal bureaucracy to get them the very assistance their tax dollars help support,” said Locke. “If the Detroit pilot program is successful, then Commerce will begin opening other ‘one stop’ offices through the Midwest and across the country.”
