Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) Projects - Strategic Growth Areas

The National Institute of Standards and Technology invites proposals from eligible organizations for projects to develop client engagement or business models and deployment strategies that integrate two or more of the MEP Strategic Growth Areas. The projects should further demonstrate in its proposed client engagement or business model, the benefit of this integration and how the approach can expand service capability and capacity of the MEP system. The five MEP Strategic Growth Areas are: supply chain, sustainability, technology acceleration, workforce and continuous improvement. Proposals should include a plan, a client engagement or business model and deployment strategy for the project, and an approach for leveraging existing tools, resources and partnerships. The objective of these projects is to demonstrate the ability to strengthen, through an integrated transformational growth services model, the global competitiveness of small- and medium-sized U.S. based manufacturing firms. Project specific performance measurement and management approaches, including key milestones, are crucial to the evaluation of these projects. NIST is seeking projects that present novel and new approaches to delivering and communicating performance measurement and evaluation. For example, those projects that incorporate the following factors will be considered competitive: internal performance measurement for management control, external evaluation for assessing outcomes of the activity, and “customer satisfaction” measures of performance. This could include approaches to gathering outcome information, comparisons of outcomes achieved by project clients or other approaches to performance measurement and evaluation. The MEP program places high importance on ensuring that projects be well aligned with the work of MEP service providers in order to maximize the potential and impact of existing resources. Additional background information on MEP service providers is provided at http://www.nist.gov/mep.