Iowa State University, Western Illinois University and the University of Illinois System launched Friday the Quad Cities Manufacturing Institute, a partnership to drive innovation and economic development through new technologies and workforce education supporting the U.S. manufacturing and defense sectors.

The new entity, also known as QCMI, will perform joint research in the advanced and additive manufacturing and materials fields. It aims to foster collaboration among the U.S. Army Rock Island Arsenal, businesses in the Quad Cities region and local community colleges, according to a news release.

“This initiative will bring to bear our strengths as a land-grant university – fostering collaboration, conducting advanced research and developing innovations that support the local workforce and drive economic growth,” Iowa State President Wendy Wintersteen said in a prepared statement about the initiative.

In addition to research and workforce training, the scope of the joint effort includes the following areas: shared research facilities and infrastructure, public-private partnerships, creating technology in collaboration with local and national industry, an engagement model for private partners, and supporting the Department of Defense through relative technologies and workforce efforts.

Iowa State University and the University of Illinois will focus on research, while Western Illinois University will leverage its workforce development programs to provide students with opportunities to learn new skills that will be developed as part of QCMI, Peter Collins, Iowa State’s Stanley chair in interdisciplinary engineering, told the Business Record in an email.

Collins, who is the lead for QCMI at Iowa State University, said Iowa State and the University of Illinois’ research focuses complement each other. Iowa State’s engineering department researches materials and materials processing; the University of Illinois works on new strategies to test the “shape and mechanical quality” of the materials being processed. QCMI will engage ISU researchers of various engineering disciplines, he said.

The collaborations that formed QCMI have been more than 10 years in the making, Collins said. Before joining Iowa State, he was involved in helping plant the seed that has become this “true bi-state initiative.”

Around 2010, a group of civic leaders in the Quad Cities formed and executed a vision to create the Quad Cities Manufacturing Laboratory (QCML), a nonprofit lab supporting the Rock Island Arsenal-Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center and local industry.

Collins joined QCML as deputy director in 2009 when Western Illinois University took over administering grants and contracts the nonprofit received. Collins said to elevate the lab’s work further, it needed relationships with top research universities and began to pursue formal partnerships with Iowa State University and the University of Illinois.

“This launch event represents this important transition from the Quad City Manufacturing Lab into the Quad City Manufacturing Institute,” he said.

Eric Faierson, a professor in Iowa State’s department of materials science and engineering, also helped establish business relationships by moving to the Quad Cities about a decade ago. He runs a remote research facility in the region leading the development of new materials and manufacturing systems to enable the 3D-printing of concrete, Collins said.

Another Iowa State research project co-located in the Quad Cities is an effort to develop new materials, shapes and manufacturing routes to produce lightweight components to protect soldiers and equipment in the military, particularly the Army. Collins, Faierson and Richard Lesar, an ISU interdisciplinary engineering professor lead the research.

Collins said as the Midwest manufacturing base faces global competition, creating QCMI equips the universities to have a more direct impact on reducing costs engrained in manufacturing and upskilling workers where they are located.

“The greater metropolitan area of the Quad Cities is home to about 465,000 hardworking Iowans and Illinoisans,” he said. “By having a direct presence in the community, we have a greater chance to work with people where they live. That ability to upskill a workforce in their own community is a profoundly different model, and is fully consistent with the mission of land grant institutions.”