Sometimes, Messe Dusseldorf the organizers of the benchmark drupa trade fair, see 20/19 and sometimes their vision is 20/20. But have no fear they are now back to 20/20. They have just announced that the next fair will be held again in the now traditional 4-year cycle from 23 June to 3 July 2020. Messe Düsseldorf says it is responding to the numerous demands voiced by exhibiting industry players.
“The current drupa, with its outstanding business deals and positive atmosphere really stands out and has made one thing perfectly clear: “Its USP are the production lines and these are in full operation here,” explains Werner M. Dornscheidt, president and CEO of Messe Düsseldorf, and adds, “This is one of the reasons why drupa is such a beacon. Precisely this investment – this is what many representatives of the exhibitor community have assured us over the past few days here – they want to be at and with drupa in the future, their No. 1 international industry platform. Therefore in the interest of our customers and international markets, drupa will stick to its 4-year cycle.”
The re-positioning of drupa 2016, its focus on future topics as well as the shorter duration of eleven days have all proven to be correct decisions. 1,837 exhibitors from 54 countries are currently showcasing their innovations and applications for print and cross-media solutions in Düsseldorf’s 19 exhibition halls.
Approximately 200,000 visitors from 183 countries visited the world’s biggest and most important trade fair in the print and media industry. And the percentage of visitors from throughout the world has also been extremely high so far: 78% have come from abroad. As of the evening of 6 June 2016, the organizers reported about 6,700 visitors from India.
Our view
As a matter of interest, we never took it for granted that the next drupa would be in 2019. And now our intuition that all was not written in stone has been proven to be correct. We think it is good that drupa stays with a 4-year cycle since it was never clear to us why it wanted to change to a faster cycle.
Although change is speeding up, we are in a medium which communicates to the human mind with ever greater excellence and we have observed over the last 30 years that ideas may change fast, talk of new things spreads quite fast, but achieving the high quality of output that modern communication requires always takes as long or even longer than earlier. At one time analysts of our industry thought that ten years are needed for a new technology idea to come to market or serial production, but in fact it has taken longer with many recent technology innovations.
As a whole one could say that we are no faster in walking the talk in this century than we were in the previous century. It may be that psychology, human rhythm and even habit have considerable influence on the success of innovation.
