Manufacturing Happy Hour

Pittsburgh’s success in the robotics space didn’t happen overnight. It’s been over 40 years in the making, with education, business, and new innovations all coming together to make the city one of the big robotics hubs alongside Boston and San Francisco. The Pittsburgh Robotics Network has been a key player in that suc

What will it take to get humanoid robots out of the experimental phase and into our daily lives? A lot of us always dreamed of having our own C-3PO at the ready, but how close are we really? Well, it’s a little more complicated than simply getting them on a production line. If we want robots to make an appearance not j

The reindustrialization movement is fully underway, and cities like Detroit are leading the charge. But how do we accelerate the timescale it takes to get America back to the ‘golden days’ of manufacturing? The key, as you’ll hear in this episode, isn’t to keep looking back at the past. It’s to use the tools and resour

What if accepting failure was the key to entrepreneurial success? Mark DeSantis has built and sold multiple companies over the years and like any entrepreneurial journey, it’s been a mixture of ups and downs, failures and successes. But in this episode, we hear that acknowledging the possibility of failure is what gave

You’ll want to grab yourself a pilsner for this episode. Manufacturing Happy Hour heads overseas to sample some fine German beer in the city of Munich…and we also headed to automatica 2025 while we were there. Europe’s biggest AI and automation event is a must-visit if you can get over there. But if not, this episode h

You might be surprised to learn what the biggest challenge manufacturers say they’re facing right now. The talent gap comes up a lot on this podcast, but early survey findings from the New American Industrial Alliance (NAIA), show that “access to capital” is really what holds most mid-market manufacturers back. In this