To be relevant, materials joining research must address important challenges facing industry.  This paper reports the results of a study conducted by EWI to identify US industry’s most important materials joining technology needs.

The Nominal Group Technique (NGT) was applied with EWI’s Industrial Advisory Board (IAB).  The IAB is a select group of representatives from a diverse range of industry sectors, including oil & gas, nuclear energy, aerospace, automotive, heavy equipment, medical devices, and a few government agencies, universities, and research institutes.  The NGT is a structured method for group brainstorming that encourages contributions from everyone.  The NGT involves each group member contributing answers to a posed topic question and then voting to identify the most important responses.  Multiple sessions were conducted with different questions focused on both long-term and short term needs.  To assess long-term needs, the following question was posed: “What will be the most important challenges in materials joining and allied technologies worldwide by the year 2016?”  To assess shorter-term needs, the following question was used: “What advancements in joining and allied technologies will have the greatest impact on business in the next 3-5 years?”  In three separate ideation sessions at total of 138 responses were collected.  Group voting was used to rank the relative importance of these responses.  Additionally, an on-line survey was conducted to obtain broader industry input.