The Critical Materials Institute (CMI) is an Energy Innovation Hub that is led by the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. CMI is focused on the research and development of technologies that can diversify the sources of critical materials; provide substitutes for materials that are in short supply; or improve the utilization of existing resources through enhanced efficiency in manufacturing and improved recycling. Within CMI, the Crosscutting Research Focus Area has been working to accelerate the development of these new technologies by ensuring that CMI research teams have ready access to key tools and capabilities, such as advanced electronic structure approaches for identifying new magnets and phosphors with reduced rare earth element content, and unique experimental techniques for high-throughput synthesis and characterization of alloy materials. Much of our work in this area is being carried out with the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) framework where computational, experimental, and data informatics tools are tightly coupled in a materials innovation infrastructure. In this talk, I will review several recent examples where CMI has used the MGI approach to achieve significant speedups in the development of technologies that address materials criticality issues. Prepared by LLNL under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.