HOT News and Findings

Competitiveness Dashboard

November 2026
 

The new Competitiveness Dashboard presents data and findings from the Annual Report on the Manufacturing Economy. It discusses what the U.S. produces, trends in growth, productivity, strategies for advancing competitiveness, factors that affect competitiveness, and supply chains. Manufacturing competitiveness is the result of an ecosystem that includes the cost, quality, and quantity of labor and capital; supply chains; infrastructure; resilience; research and development; and product differentiation and performance. The characteristics of these factors, and their interactions, can create either opportunities to improve competitiveness or constraints that limit it. 

Achieving NIST's mission to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness through advances in measurement science, standards, and technology requires not only advancing individual technologies but also understanding how U.S. manufacturing performs, where competitive gaps exist, and which structural factors influence productivity and industrial capacity. A rigorous, data-driven assessment of manufacturing competitiveness provides a foundation for connecting technological progress to industrial outcomes and for identifying areas where further research, technological development, or investment may have the greatest potential impact.  >>Visit the Dashboard

Economic Framework

June 2026
NIST AMS 100-80 proposes an organization-wide system of continuous improvement to increase impact in advancing U.S. manufacturing competitiveness. To maximize the impact of each dollar invested in research and development (R&D), change agents (i.e., those who invest in advancing manufacturing competitiveness such as governments or trade organizations) will likely need to transition from intuition-based selection to rigorous measurement science. By treating each R&D project as an experiment with a clear hypothesis and measurable outcome, organizations can create a feedback loop that systematically improves future investment accuracy. >>Read the full report

Supply Chain Disruption

September 2025
NIST AMS 100-71 provides a literature review of supply chain disruption and agent-based models. It also develops an agent-based model proof of concept to examine emergent phenomena in supply chain disruption. This model will eventually be used to 1) examine how supply chain disruptions might propagate downstream, demonstrating the findings of previous papers and 2) identify emergent behavior or patterns in supply chains as it relates to disruptions. >>Read the full report