America's approach to technical innovation must undergo transformation for the country to successfully compete in the global technology race. According to the National Academies, Rising Above the Gathers Storm report, the following actions must occur for a successful transformation: increasing the talent pool through improved K-12 education, sowing the seeds through a strengthened commitment to long-term research, attracting and retaining the top scientist and engineers, and developing a culture and environment to encourage innovation. In an effort to accelerate this transformation, the President introduced the America Competitiveness Initiative (ACI), a bold action to increase national investments in research and development, math and science education and innovation/entrepreneurship. In this presentation we will describe efforts underway at the Sandia National Laboratories to stand-up Discovery Science and Engineering Innovation Institutes (DSEII) as part of the ACI.

DSEIIs will be technology incubators and centers of learning, for undergraduate and graduate students, that build off the expertise and facilities resident at the host national laboratory and will bring together academia, industry and government in powerful partnerships. The network of National Laboratories, and the investments they represent, are significant and can provide a unique opportunity to accelerate the translation from idea to innovation. Developing a system of DSEIIs focused on key research areas and critical technologies will facilitate cooperative innovation and offering new educational (graduate and undergraduate) opportunities with a national reach and a strong regional impact.

The prototype DSEII currently being proposed by Sandia National Laboratories and their partners is the National Institute for Nano Engineering (NINE). Nano-engineering is one of the coming century's most exciting and potentially important areas of science and technology and is one whose economic benefits will depend on an educational infrastructure that supports the training of students, teachers, university faculty, research and technical work from a diverse set of technical disciplines. NINE represents a new paradigm of partnership among universities, industry and national laboratories. The Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency have made significant investments at Sandia National Laboratories in microsystems, nano-sciences and high-performance computing which provide key capabilities needed to drive future competitiveness in nano-scale technologies and transform education in the field of nano-engineering. NINE will be a distributed enterprise, with its hub at Sandia and with spokes at major universities and with key industrial participants. NINE would demonstrate the path for creating new entities which are both technology incubators and centers of learning. An understanding of how NINE will operate and the unique partnership being established with the partners will be discussed.