Officials and business leaders celebrated the official opening of the Digital Foundry at New Kensington on June 1 with a ceremony and reception event that also offered public tours of the new space.
The more than 15,000-square-foot facility is hoping to serve as a digital innovation and manufacturing lab space in the heart of downtown New Kensington and is now open to local manufacturers, K-12 school districts, college students, entrepreneurs, businesses and others.
To help get it launched back in October 2020, the Digital Foundry received a $5.5 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, among other investments. Its existence today is also the result of a partnership between Penn State New Kensington and the Westmoreland County Economic Growth Connection.
"What I love about this particular project … it is extraordinary because we are educating and then retaining local talent, which is critical to driving entrepreneurship and innovation," Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi said. "We are showing that we are vital educational and economic development engines for our local communities and most importantly, for Pennsylvania families; they are looking to us."
Now that it's open, the Digital Foundry will look to serve as a "launching pad" to train the region's populace on software tools, digital data and equipment used for product development, manufacturing and other business-related operations. It hosted its first class for students on the evening of the same day that it opened.
Through a membership platform, the Digital Foundry will also look to serve as a demo-like space for businesses as well, especially for those that might be interested in incorporating new but expensive technologies into their companies. With the Digital Foundry, some of these technologies will be available at a smaller scale for businesses to learn more about and to try, like robotic arms, so that an interested business can see if such an investment would make sense for their needs.
For Neil Weaver, the acting secretary for the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the Digital Foundry's opening comes at a time when he believes that workforce development has become a bigger issue now than it has been in decades before.
"We all know the situation; businesses need workers to fill their open positions, but due to barriers, including lack of training, thousands of Pennsylvania jobs remain unfilled," Weaver said. "In order to solve our workforce challenges, we need bold, innovative new initiatives to help employers and prospective workers that provide training at all skill levels from basic to advanced and that serve those who are traditionally underserved. The Digital Foundry will do that and more."
Sherri McCleary is tasked with spearheading those efforts as the Digital Foundry's director. She brings more than 30 years of executive-level leadership to the position, most recently serving as the director of additive manufacturing-business at Kennametal Inc.
"I think the pandemic just accelerated the need for individuals and businesses to figure out how they grasp the rapid change in technology that we're seeing in a way that will benefit them either personally or professionally or as a business," McCleary said. "What a lot of businesses are realizing is that what could be the saving grace for a lot of those problems is adding more technology, adding technology that enables you to grow your business by doing more with less people."
In September 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy, in partnership with the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Institute, designated Penn State New Kensington as one of four new Smart Manufacturing Innovation Centers (SMIC), specifically for its Digital Foundry facility. That made Penn State New Kensington one of eight SMIC throughout the country at the time.
