More than 30 leaders representing a broad cross-section of the materials and manufacturing industries are the initial signatories to a newly developed set of principles designed to provide guidance on pursuing collaborative efforts to accelerate the materials innovation process and drive manufacturing and economic growth.

The principles, called the Orlando Materials Innovation Principles, were released recently by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS). They were developed as an outcome of the TMS Materials/Manufacturing Leaders Summit held March 15 in Orlando, Fla., that drew on 50 experts to identify approaches addressing the challenges presented by the U.S. Materials Genome Initiative. TMS organized the summit in cooperation with the U.S. Council on Competitiveness.

The principles call upon the diversity of disciplines and industrial sectors vital to the U.S. manufacturing economy to work together on developing a more dynamic approach to materials innovation.

To date, the initial signatories to the Orlando Materials Innovation Principles are: TMS, 3M, A123 Systems, Alcoa, Battelle, Boeing, Carnegie Mellon University, Carpenter Technology Corp., Corning, Cowles Consulting, Cummins Inc., Deere & Co., Dow Chemical, DuPont, ESI North America, Ford Motor Co., GE Aviation, General Motors, Intermolecular Inc., Johns Hopkins University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mercury Marine, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, QuesTek Innovations, Sandia National Laboratories, Thermo-Calc Software, Inc., Timken, University of California, Davis, University of Michigan, Worchester Polytechnic Institute, and wTe Corp.

Specifically, the principles are:

•To work as a community to demonstrate accelerated materials discovery, development, deployment, and manufacturing through pre-competitive projects that address significant national goals.

•To actively incorporate engineering tools and concepts to accelerate commercial product development, design, and manufacturing across all industries.

•To create a materials innovation infrastructure with common resources for data and knowledge sharing that can be used openly for model development and validation.

•To support educational initiatives to train the current and future workforce in materials innovation tools and the concurrent materials, design, and manufacturing mindset.

Launched in June 2011, the Materials Genome Initiative is an effort to develop an innovation infrastructure that accelerates materials discovery and deployment. It will support the development of computational tools, software, new methods for material characterization, and the development of open standards and databases that will make the process of discovery and development of advanced materials faster, less expensive, and more predictable.

"Industry leadership in this effort is essential," said Warren Hunt, TMS executive director. "The innovation tools emerging from the MGI and related initiatives will only deliver the economic benefits that they promise if industry effectively uses those tools."

TMS is a member-driven international professional society dedicated to fostering the exchange of learning and ideas across the entire range of materials science and engineering, from minerals processing and primary metals production, to basic research and the advanced applications of materials.

Building on its recognized leadership in integrated computational materials engineering, TMS says it has committed to helping with the development of a new innovation infrastructure that unifies and streamlines materials design and manufacturing processes.