Abstract Cleveland State University's Advanced Manufacturing Center (AMC) provides an opportunity for students at CSU and three affiliated community colleges, along with workforce trainees, to have hands-on experience in manufacturing process development and production. The Center's mission is to provide the region's manufacturers with the products, processes, ideas, and people they need to become more profitable and to create jobs. The Center is a partnership between Cleveland State University, the Cleveland Advanced Manufacturing Program (CAMP), and industry, with at least half of the revenue for the Center coming from industry. Center students, faculty and staff work on projects that fit the needs of a particular company and then apply the research findings industry-wide, thus giving engineering students an educational experience in industrially relevant engineering problems. This award supports a National conference to benchmark best practices of similar centers, the refinement the AMC model, and the development of a list of possible replication sites.