This month, I attended a manufacturing industry event, like I often do. But instead of getting on a plane to New York City, or driving four hours to Youngstown, I only had to drive ten minutes for the inaugural Dayton Regional Ecosystem for Advanced Manufacturing, or DREAM, Symposium.
Spearheaded by Dayton area-based companies Hyphen Innovations, Dayton Photonics, Skuld LLC, and Laser Fusion Solutions, this small event in my Ohio hometown was conversational and relationship-driven, focused on the people working to build, test, fund, and deploy advanced manufacturing, many of whom are right here in Dayton. DREAM welcomed academia, industry, and government to discuss how emerging technologies make it to real-world deployment.
There’s a lot of manufacturing innovation going on in Ohio; it’s a core state of the Rust Belt, after all. In Dayton specifically, we’ve got the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI); Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), which houses the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL); and plenty of manufacturing companies. This is where the Wright Brothers invented flight, and where Charles F. Kettering worked on the electrical starting motor and the “Bug” aerial torpedo!…