IMS is an international program to support R&D in manufacturing among the advanced developed countries of Japan, USA, European Union, Korea and Switzerland. As the first government-supported program to offer a multi-lateral global approach to research in advanced manufacturing, IMS continues to innovate and reinvent itself in order to be relevant to researchers around the globe. In its latest response to researchers input from the IMS Vision Forum, IMS has launched the “Manufacturing Technology Platform Initiative”, or MTP. The MTP initiative is a unique program that threads research and researchers together in a simple way to solve manufacturing challenges of today and the future. The program not only simplifies the process for organizing research under the IMS banner, but it also promotes a spark of new ideas through wider networks that are created. MTPs are focused knowledge sharing platforms for researcher groups that are already engaged in a specific R&D domain. There is overlap in much research that is conducted. Rather than duplicate work, an MTP initiative seeks cooperation to conduct joint research in projects that are already running. This ultimately saves resources for the “golden nuggets” of their research, and finds common solutions to manufacturing challenges in the process. MTP’s also provide an opportunity for researchers to meet, exchange information, and generate new ideas for research.