LiveWorx Kicks Off With Digital Transformation Imperative: Prepare to Change

Six thousand innovators, change makers, and influencers from 70 countries, all gathered under one roof for four-days of jam-packed education, networking, and entertainment.

Three hundred thought leaders, executives, designers, IT practitioners, and industry evangelists unveiling the latest tech applications and software.

Two hundred and forty breakout sessions offering technical use cases, interactive Q&A’s, small working groups, tech-powered panels, product updates, and more.

One hundred and twenty global press and more than 100 sponsors and partners.

One community of technologists exploring the opportunities created by the convergence of the physical and digital worlds.

This is LiveWorx, the world’s most respected digital transformation conference, featuring 150,000 square feet of cutting-edge technology solutions in Boston’s Innovation District.

This year’s show kicked off with a multimedia explosion of sounds, lights, lasers, and performers, paving the way for a thrilling journey of innovative and disruptive technologies: IoT, AR/VR, machine learning, blockchain, and robotics.

Jim Heppelmann, President & CEO, PTC, introduced LiveWorx 2018 with one simple message: To compete and succeed today, companies and their employees need to embrace a “constant state of change.”

“We need a mindset where clock speeds are short, innovation is continuous, and where a willingness to react quickly and change frequently is a core competency,” he said. The PTC acronym, he often tells employees, could actually stand for “prepare to change.”

“Innovation velocity” resonated throughout the first day of LiveWorx, with talk tracks, technical sessions, and demos and prototypes all supporting the idea that digital transformation is the here and now – not just the promise of tomorrow. It’s happening all around us and tech trailblazers are keeping pace.

Check out PTC’s LiveWorx day one highlights:

Place to a Pace

Heppelmann’s catchphrase “place to a pace” transcends innovation at the product level. At PTC, he explained, the company embraces the perspective in all aspects of business.
“It’s how we think about our role in the technology universe, how we work with partners, where our headquarters should be, how our business model works, the way we drive technology innovation, how we evolve our culture, even the way we think about security and privacy,” he said.

Linda Hill, Ph.D. (above), Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School, also spoke about the need to engrain innovation in company culture.
Innovation leaders, she said, see their primary role not as the visionary but as the creator of a context in which others are willing and able to innovate. True innovation involves embracing diversity of ideas as well as experimentation.

Partnerships Are Powerful

Embracing a constant state of change doesn’t just mean driving internal company collaboration – it also means leveraging external strengths. In his keynote address, Heppelmann spoke of partnerships and how they are critical to tech innovation. “No one company can do it alone,” he said.

Day one of LiveWorx saw several PTC partner announcements and discussions. On the heels of a major partnership announcement between PTC and Rockwell Automation, Heppelmann announced that PTC is also entering into a new partnership with ANSYS. The two companies will work together to integrate ANSYS’ Discovery Live real-time simulation capabilities into Creo, so that engineers can immediately see implications of every design change that they make.

Heppelmann’s keynote featured Ajei Gopal, President & CEO, ANSYS; Blake Moret, Chairman & CEO, Rockwell Automation; and Rodney Clark (above), Vice President, IoT & Mixed Reality Sales, Microsoft, who spoke about Microsoft’s existing partnership with PTC to help customers accelerate their digital transformations in IoT.

Tech Playground

Day one of LiveWorx 2018 featured both stage and show floor, with more than 85 exhibitors offering a catalytic marketplace of ideas and solutions built for the outer limits of digital transformation and product development.

PTC partners also collaborated on X-Factory, an immersive, highly interactive digital thread and Industrie 4.0 experience demonstrating how they change the way humans and machines interact in a manufacturing environment.

Xtropolis, an interactive city with jaw-dropping demos, interactive learning labs, and mind-bending surprises, is inspired by possibility – a true tech playground to witness.

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