Inside the 2026 MI2 Innovation Tour

In May, MI2 sent solutions for the metals manufacturing industry on the road across Kentucky. The 2026 Innovation Tour ran three days across four regions, putting metals manufacturers and solution providers in the same room, often for the first time, to talk directly about the problems keeping people up at night.

Day one opened in Louisville and Northern Kentucky. The morning ran at the University of Louisville's Speed School of Engineering with Nucor's River Metals Recycling, followed by an afternoon session at the Carroll County Fairgrounds hosted by North American Stainless.Day two moved the group to Logan County, where leaders from Novelis and Logan Aluminum met solutions providers at the Logan Career and Technical Center. MI2 member Passage Creative then hosted a social that evening, giving attendees a more relaxed setting to keep the conversations from the day going.

Day three closed out the tour in Bowling Green.Constellium hosted a breakfast session at their facility that, by every account, became the highlight of the Tour. Rather than a standard pitch, Constellium walked attendees through their business department by department, laying out specific goals and challenges along the way, and then gave each value provider the opportunity to share their innovative solutions. "The session with Constellium stood out as a very valuable session," one attendee wrote afterward. "Hearing from their department heads, highlighting their specific goals and challenges, was insightful, and helped everyone bring value to the conversation."

The Constellium format made enough of an impression that MI2 plans to use it as a template going forward, giving host manufacturers a structured way to brief the room before solution providers pitch.

Our final session was that afternoon at our headquarters at the WKU Innovation Campus, where solutions providers presented their work to executives from Bilstein Cold Rolled Steel and AKFA, in a session kicked off by WKU Provost Dr. Bud Fischer.

Among manufacturer attendees, 100 percent said they heard solutions specifically relevant to their operation, and 100 percent of manufacturing attendees said the session raised their awareness of what's available. Solution providers, for their part, said they were struck by how openly manufacturers were willing to talk about their challenges.

"Client willingness to discuss their challenges openly," one provider wrote, was the biggest surprise of the whole event.

One comment summed up the Tour better than any stat could. "I've been with our firm for 33 years, and we have never been part of an event as helpful as this one," a longtime solution provider wrote. "The format and the networking were as good as one could hope for." Bob Soffel of CES put it plainly in a note to the MI2 team after the Tour wrapped. "Events like these exemplify the importance of sharing knowledge and demonstrating the potential for scalable, durable, and reliable improvements across MI2 members," he wrote, adding that he and his fellow solution providers were grateful for the support MI2 provided throughout.

With our InnoSearch now open and KYIC set for October, the Innovation Tour did exactly what it was built to do: get Kentucky's metals industry talking to each other, in person, about problems worth solving together.

×

‍