The materials innovation ecosystem: A key enabler for the Materials Genome Initiative

The US Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) has emphasized the need to accelerate the discovery and development of materials to maintain industry competitiveness in new and existing markets. While largely interpreted as an initiative arising from the materials community, it is important to address the coupling of materials with manufacturing and all other relevant aspects of product development in order to maximize its impact. The dual thrusts of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering and the MGI represent a long-term vision of industry, academic, and government stakeholders. The goal is to build a new kind of coupled experimental, computational, and data sciences infrastructure. The emphasis is on high-throughput methods to accelerate historical sequential processes of serendipitous materials discovery and largely empirical materials development by leveraging computation and modern data sciences and analytics. The notion of a materials innovation ecosystem is introduced as the framework in which to pursue acceleration of discovery and development of materials consisting of various elements of data sciences, design optimization, manufacturing scale-up and automation, multiscale modeling, and uncertainty quantification with verification and validation.