Michigan State partners with Apple Inc. to help grow businesses in Detroit
Posted By: Detroit News on August 20, 2025. For more information, please click here to read the source article.
The Apple Manufacturing Academy launched this week in Detroit, the first such facility in the United States geared toward training small and mid-sized business owners on using new technology to grow their ventures.
Lorraine’s Premium BBQ Sauce creator and company founder Larry Crockett attended the first two days of the Apple Manufacturing Academy, a partnership between Michigan State University and Apple Inc. in downtown Detroit. The academy, the first of its kind in the United States, aims to train small and mid-sized business owners on growing their operations and implementing new technology.
“I learned so much,” Crockett said Wednesday. “I just appreciate Apple making this platform, and it’s just my luck it’s located in Detroit.”
The Apple Manufacturing Academy is the latest partnership between MSU and Apple Inc. located in Detroit. In 2021, the Apple Developer Academy opened to teach coding, design, entrepreneurship and professional skills.
For MSU, it’s important to have a footprint in Detroit and train the next generation of business owners and product developers, and those who want to learn how to make their existing businesses better, Academy Director Sarah Gretter said.
“One of the missions we have at MSU is to provide educational opportunities to people across their lifespan,” Gretter said. “Working with small, medium businesses is part of that mission for us as a land grant institution. We ask ‘How can we continue offering learning opportunities for people in their careers, in their work and continue learning?’ Especially in this age of rapid advances in technologies, the learning needs to be continuous.”
The academy’s aims
In February, Apple said it would bring the academy to Detroit as part of the tech company’s commitment to invest in American innovation and advanced manufacturing.
The location was also a non-brainer for Apple and Michigan State, Gretter said. MSU also has a partnership with Apple for its Apple Developer Academy, located at the same site as the manufacturing academy.
The manufacturing academy’s curriculum will include training in project management, manufacturing process optimization and leadership skills, aimed at improving productivity, efficiency and quality across supply chains. The academy will also offer consulting services virtually and in-person.
“Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence are more common in a lot of the larger companies where they have experts for these specific concepts,” Apple Inc. Director of Product Operations Jaime Herrera said. “And small and medium-sized businesses will need to start implementing those in order to continue to grow.
“If we start talking to small and medium-sized businesses, we can start to help them and make sure they don’t have the barrier of thinking, ‘There’s no way I could do this,’ or ‘It’s going to be too expensive,’ or ‘I don’t have the experts,'” Herrera said. “We want to try to break that by making it accessible.”
Business owners, Herrera said, should come to the academy with a specific problem. The goal isn’t to start big, but address small issues with the help of Apple’s and MSU’s experts and grow from there.
And the idea of basing it in Detroit, Gretter said, was simply an expansion of the university’s footprint here and a nod to the deep manufacturing history of the city.
“Detroit is the prime location for honoring the history around manufacturing,” she said. “So it made a lot of sense to do this here … Manufacturing is part of the fabric of the state.”
And the academy’s first two days have already had an impact on business owners like Crockett. He said he planned to expand his BBQ business and would use the concepts he learned over the past two days to do so.
“I’m learning so much here,” he said. “It really is a masterclass.”
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