The Business School

The WPI Center for Innovative Manufacturing Solutions is funded by the MassDevelopment Manufacturing Innovation Grants program. Housed in the Foisie Business School, the Center provides consulting service and expertise to help small- to medium-size manufacturers grow their businesses. The program is open to Massachusetts manufacturers with 100 or fewer employees in need of expertise and equipment to support product development, prototyping, scaling up, cost reduction, and other assistance.

The Center leverages the extensive business and manufacturing experience of co-directors Walter Towner and Torbjorn Bergstrom while drawing on the knowledge of talented faculty in the Foisie Business School, who bring expertise in the areas of industrial engineering, operations management, financial modeling, equipment justification, technology commercialization, and Lean Six Sigma, along with traditional areas of marketing strategy and development, accounting, and finance.

A close collaboration with the divisions of Engineering and Arts & Sciences means businesses also have access to technical experts in the following disciplines:

In addition, the Center is closely aligned with the WPI Haas Technical Education Center, part of WPI’s Manufacturing Laboratories, which houses state-of-the-art CNC machine tools, software, and training that facilitate the realization and fabrication of parts that students have designed on computers.

Contact Us for more information and to learn how your company can qualify and apply for a consultation.

Partial Funding By MassDevelopment

Under the program, MassDevelopment will pay the lesser of 75 percent or $75,000 of the cost of a contract between a company and the Innovation Center of its choice. Companies will pay the remaining costs and contract directly with their chosen Center.

The MassDevelopment Grant recognizes our past contributions and strength in manufacturing and helps us reaffirm and facilitate our commitment to use our expertise for the support and development of the manufacturing sector in Massachusetts.
Bogdan M. Vernescu, WPI Vice Provost for Research