Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation: a new forum for the exchange of information to integrate materials, manufacturing, and design engineering innovations

A number of contemporary studies have concluded that the research and engineering activities across materials, manufacturing, and product design need to be more closely coupled to enable responsive product innovation and delivery [1-3]. The recurrent themes in these studies point out that the fields of materials and manufacturing must strive to become more quantitative and predictive and have to reshape and integrate their engineering practices and outputs to better synchronize with product design engineering frameworks. This philosophy is strongly embraced by a relatively new discipline known as Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) which seeks to accelerate the development and deployment of advanced materials [3]. The complexities and opportunities of a fully engaged global research and manufacturing enterprise and the rapid speed of present day product design cycles demand a new ICME-based paradigm for how we work, collaborate, and share knowledge. Hence the time is right to introduce Integrating Materials and Manufacturing Innovation (IMMI), a new journal that focuses on the issues and opportunities facing the materials and manufacturing community in building this new paradigm. The community is becoming ever more reliant on global collaboration, integrated design teams, digital data, computational modeling, and more complex and high throughput experimentation. In addition to integrating these themes in one publication venue, it is clear we need to evolve not only the way in which we disseminate ideas and information, but the format and richness in which it is shared. This journal will promote a discourse that fosters ICME, the accelerated implementation of advanced materials in the product design cycle, and the minimization of the disciplinary