Led by MIT and spurred by a $500 million White House initiative, universities nationwide are helping reinvent one of the country’s most critical industries. They are pouring money and political capital into measures that reach across disciplines to devise new products and produce them en masse. Create new ways of making stuff, the thinking goes, and you create jobs for hundreds of thousands of people out of work. But these factories most surely are not the factories of the 20th century. They are full of high-tech machines that cost more than a Ferrari. They use advanced robots to perform precise tasks and nanoscale technology that alters the fundamental properties of materials. They often make their products in a fraction of the time it used to take.
