In 1989, the MIT Commission on Industrial Productivity produced the Made in America report. One of the recommendations of Made in America was to establish the Industrial Performance Center (IPC) to carry on the interdisciplinary investigations of industrial productivity, innovation, and competitiveness that the Commission had begun. Established in 1991, with the help of a major grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the IPC has brought together faculty and students from all five MIT Schools in research collaborations on industry. Since its inception, the faculty, students and affiliates of the IPC have produced numerous books, articles, papers and other publications that have advanced the understanding of strategic, technological, and organizational developments in a broad range of industries.
Project | October 16, 2023
MIT Automation Clinic
The Automation Clinic is an applied research and education program to understand how organizations make new technologies work in practice. MIT researchers and their partners work with organizations to learn the problems they aim to solve with new technologies, the challenges they face in deploying them, and the consequences for their workers, customers, and society. […]
Article | October 9, 2023
The State of Industrial Robotics: Emerging Technologies, Challenges, and Key Research Directions
Robotics and related technologies are central to the ongoing digitization and advancement of manufacturing. In recent years, a variety of strategic initiatives around the world including “Industry 4.0”, introduced in Germany in 2011 have aimed to improve and connect manufacturing technologies in order to optimize production processes.
Article | September 24, 2023
A Smarter Strategy for Using Robots
Despite advances in automation technology, the promise of productive and flexible automation, with minimal involvement of human workers, is far from reality, for two main reasons. First, adoption of automation technology has been limited. Second, when firms do automate, what they gain in productivity they tend to lose in process flexibility, resulting in what the […]