Lighting and technology companies today face complex challenges in planning products and systems including: 1) the intrusion  of IT and big data into many industries, especially lighting; 2) rapid change in technology following a period of many decades of relative stasis in lighting; 3) incomplete understanding of rates of adoption and replacement; 4) a business culture that assumes “disruption” and blitzscaling that work for IT and consumer electronics also work for lighting; and 5) lack of perspectives on and tools for envisioning and managing the future of lighting, controls, and building technology.

This daylong workshop combines insights and tools from diverse sources: scenario planning; advanced midrange crowd-sourced forecasting; and behavioral economics. Workshop registrants will receive a pre-workshop primer with preparatory material, including macro scenarios that the speaker team has developed. The workshop begins with presentations from the panel that provide relevant ideas, case studies, and examples of improved decision making and successful strategy in different companies. Then teams are formed, each is given a specific hypothetical product roadmap with one or more critical decisions and challenged to think it through, creating 3-4 different scenarios that are used to test assumptions, test ideas, and set metrics for success. Each team then presents its scenarios to the speaker panel, who pose as investors interested in funding the project and offer comments and feedback.

The workshop is designed for product managers, engineers, designers, sales and marketing professionals, specifiers, technical advisors, and C level company officers, consultants, and investors in lighting and electronics manufacturing companies who need strategic decision support tools to help manage technology development and integration, sales and marketing, operations, logistics, SKU proliferation, certifications, code compliance, and supply chain coordination.

Learning Objectives

1. Improve product roadmap decisions in assessing and implementing new technologies, allocating development resources, investing, marketing, and product management

2. Use new perspectives on changes in adoption and replacement of components, systems, and infrastructure of communications, controls, lighting, and power distribution

3. Crowdsource collaborative networks with diverse views that test assumptions, key questions, roadmaps, and strengthen forecasting

4. Stimulate deep imagination and visualization by understanding, then moving beyond the limits of the past to actively creating the future

Speakers: