President Barack Obama will announce on Tuesday a series of new executive actions and new commitments from local leaders nationwide to spur entrepreneurship as a way to boost manufacturing, according to White House officials.
Obama will travel to TechShop, a community-based workshop, in Pittsburgh Tuesday to make the announcements. The next day, he will hold the first-ever White House Maker Faire, where he will meet with entrepreneurs who are using new tools to launch businesses, learn science, technology, engineering and math and fuel manufacturing.
Specifically, he will announce:
--More than 90 mayors and local leaders have committed to the ‘Mayors Maker Challenge’ to increase the number of locations and equipment available in their communities for this type of entrepreneurship.
--Access to more than $5 billion worth of advanced equipment in over 700 federal research and development facilities available to entrepreneurs.
--Investments of more than $150 million in research to support the Materials Genome Initiative, a public-private initiative that aims to cut in half the time it takes to develop novel materials.
The White House also is releasing a new report, Making in America: U.S. Manufacturing Entrepreneurship and Innovation, that indicates that new technologies are reducing the cost, increasing the speed and making it easier for manufacturers.
Manufacturing represents 12 percent of U.S. GDP, yet accounts for 75 percent of all U.S. private sector research and development, and the vast majority of all patents issued in the United States, according to White House officials. Since February 2010, the U.S has directly added 646,000 manufacturing jobs.