"Shift your focus from managing the known to mastering the next." - Futurist Jim Carroll
After all, today's comfort is tomorrow's vulnerability!
A session description just went out for my upcoming keynote for BIFMA.
Who's that? The Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturing Association!
Here's what I'll be covering:
Harnessing Technology for Unprecedented Growth
The complex new future is not just happening with AI - we are seeing the maturity of industrial autonomous technologies, robots, machine intelligence and vision systems, digital twin and augmented reality technologies, the impact of ‘sensorworld,' drones, and more.
The scope of these technologies represents significant implications from very real business model disruption to unique legal and copyright issues, education, knowledge, and workforce skills challenges, as well as the emergence of disruptive new industry competitors and accelerated new product development and innovation opportunities. All of which require companies to pick up the pace. Join us as
Jim covers:
- Technology applications for the product manufacturing Industry
- Case studies on how technologies are being applied
- Strategies in how and where to invest
The key theme for the people in the room? They need to shift their focus from the current reality to the next one. Yes, there's a huge amount of change, uncertainty, and volatility going on, and it's not an easy time to be moving forward. That said, if you don't do it now, the chasm between what's possible and what's actualized will only become bigger.
I've had a few calls with these folks to walk through the trends, technologies, and ideas that will define their future, and there's a lot to cover. I've been covering the sector for well over two decades, and there are dozens of posts related to the above in the manufacturing category of my website.
What drew the attention of a few of their team was my manufacturing-specific keynote description. In an era of pap, generic content, relevance matters! It's over at manufacturing.jimcarroll.com.
I've been going through the issues and the trends, and coming up with a list of ten key pieces of advice I'll offer to the manufacturing and technology leaders at the conference:
- Embrace the Shift to Mass Customization: Stop adhering to the "make-to-stock" model and pivot aggressively to a "make-to-order" approach by leveraging technology like 3D printing to offer personalized products at scale.
- Invest in Digital Twins for Iterative Design: Use digital twin technology—virtual replicas of products and factory processes—to simulate, test, and instantly redesign concepts, accelerating product development from months to days or weeks.
- Prioritize Workforce Upskilling: Acknowledge that old-school labor is gone; the future requires a highly skilled workforce fluent in advanced technologies like robotics, digitization, and AI.
- Integrate AI Beyond Chatbots: Focus your AI investment on profound transformation in the factory, including machine vision for quality control, predictive maintenance for equipment, and AI-driven analytics for supply chain optimization, rather than merely large language models.
- Build Agility as a Core Competency: Recognize that product lifecycles are collapsing, demanding that your entire organization—from design to assembly—is agile and flexible enough to manage high-mix, low-volume production.
- Unleash the Power of Collaboration: Look beyond your internal R&D lab and embrace open innovation, crowd-thinking, and cross-functional collaboration to speed up product design and solve complex challenges.
- Drive Decisions with Real-Time Data: Implement Industrial IoT sensors and systems that provide real-time data to move from reactive crisis management to proactive, predictive governance and smarter decision-making on the factory floor.
- Realign Business Models to 'Service-ification': Understand that technology is transforming your physical products into intelligent, connected devices, paving the way for lucrative 'product-as-a-service' and uptime-guarantee revenue streams.
- Think Long-Term Amid Policy Volatility: Do not let short-term economic headwinds or unpredictable policies distract you from long-term, strategic technology investments necessary for a sustainable competitive advantage.
- Act Now—Experiment and Gain Experience: Don't wait for "perfect clarity" on every trend; start small, invest in experiential capital, and relentlessly apply new technologies to continuously reinvent your value proposition.
It's this type of insight resonating with people in today's fast-moving uncertainty, and there's a lot more yet to come.
Futurist Jim Carroll has spoken at dozens of conferences and leadership meetings on the topic of manufacturing innovation.