That connectivity, under the banner 'connection of competence' not only includes the methods of production but also of ideas, of business models and of expertise.
Welcoming the world’s print media to the event PrintCity president, Helmut (John) Danglemaier said that PrintCity was now 10 years old, and had developed far from its origins, but remained true to ideal of sharing knowledge for the benefit of printers.
Speaking on the first morning of the event held in the exclusive and beautiful Tegernsee resort in the foothills of the Alps, PrintCity's managing director Rainer Kuhn said that drupa will host seven separate PrintCity competency centres where the member companies would display to the world the increasing benefits of their co-operation.
The seven competency centres include Brand Protection, Folding Carton packaging for food, Value Added UV printing, Value Added web offset, Workflow integration and networking, Digital Transpromo and Print Meets the Electronic Media.
Kuhn said each of these distinct competence centres would enable drupa visitors to gain a full understanding of the benefits of the PrintCity partnerships. Essentially PrintCity is enabling the sharing of the knowledge by individual companies with other related companies, so resulting in dynamic new opportunities for printers that would not be possible under the single vendor solution approach.
PirntCity will also host Print + X, aimed at print buyers, creatives and brand owners, and designed to communicate to them the benefits of added value print. In a similar vein it will also have a Print4Life lounge, where the same group of people can interact with print ales staff and gain a deeper understanding of the ability of print to provide businesses with positioning, differentiation and branding.
The first day saw presentations from each of PrintCity's four tier one members; MAN Roland, Oce, UPM Kymenne and Sun Chemical.
UPM focused on sustainability and its new education programme for printers. Sun Chemical highlighted its Six Sigma quality control manufacturing programme.
Oce talked about the changes since drupa 2004, including the rapid development and acceptance of digital colour printing, while MAN Roland presented on the need for suppliers to be much closer to printers' businesses than they were in the past.
In fact this latter point was one of the common themes of the day, and at drupa printers are certain to hear virtually every vendor talking about their customer business development models.
The first day ended with a discussion on the future of print, which not surprisingly was overwhelmingly positive in its belief that print has a strong future, after all as it was pointed out that paper has been around for 2500 years so is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
