JEC Forum Chicago 2019: A great success for this new format

JEC Forum Chicago 2019, with its new format combining business meetings and conference sessions was a great success. In fact, with 201 delegates and 490 business meetings organized on site, it reveals that North American composites industrials value this new format.

Business and Knowledge all at once

The forum was the occasion for sponsors to showcase their solutions, industry buyers from the all the composites value-chain to easily meet during pre-arranged business, without mentioning a great participation of Top buyers from Arevo, Bollinger Motors, Bouygues – CBNA: Civil & Building North America, Florida Department of Transportation and John Deere. All confirmed that their meetings were very successful and would be leading to prolific cooperation in the future.

“Our experience has been fantastic, being able to utilize interview schedule system has paid off tremendously. Our booth has been well occupied with several industry leaders coming and looking for unique and dedicated solutions”, quoted David Shippee from Composite Fabrics of America.

Not to mention the official visit of the French Deputy Consul General, Frédéric Cholé, along with a delegation of Business France in North America (the organization fostering French businesses abroad), who were very enthusiastic about the dynamism of our industry and our startup competition.

Finally, the conference sessions were the playground of world class speakers from MIT and Stanford University speaking mainly about the latest developments and researches in composite materials in Ground Transportation and Construction. Experts from IACMI McKinsey, Bloomberg, Hennecke, Lanxess, Chomarat, Shell took also the stage to host compelling conferences on the future of composites.

“The conversation between looking forward academics, researchers, pioneering companies and just the broad industry is critical in our sector, and JEC Forum Chicago is an incredible platform for that,” said Mark Goulthorpe, the Chairman of the construction sessions, from MIT Architecture Department.

Celebrating innovation: JEC Innovation Awards and Startup Booster winners

For the past 15 years, JEC Innovation Awards have rewarded the best cutting-edge and ingenious projects using composites to their full potential in different categories. For this edition of JEC Forum Chicago, the winners of the 4 categories were rewarded on Wednesday right after a very inspiring speech from Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of Hyperloop TT.

“Events like JEC ones are amazing because you meet the guys that actually know what they are doing, that are the experts. Mingling with people and exchanging ideas is the secret recipe to success,” said Dirk Ahlborn after his speech.

The JEC Innovation awards winners by categories are:

• Mobility: KTM-TECHNOLOGIES GmbH – Austria
• Building: GAZECHIM COMPOSITES IBERICA – Spain
• Automotive: Surface Generation – United Kingdom
• Infrastructure: Carbo-Link AG – Switzerland

The ceremony of the first round of the Startup Booster World Tour ended the 2-day event by recognizing 3 of the most promising startups in North America developing new composites solutions; the Gold Winner is Continuous Composites (Continuous Fiber 3D Printing Technology) ; the Silver Winner is Vartega (Recycler of Advanced Material) and the Bronze one is Visolis (Carbon Negative Materials). All of them won the chance to showcase their work at JEC World 2020 in March and the Gold winner will compete for the final.

“JEC Forum Chicago is a unique event in the world of composites bringing together all the value chain in the US. This edition was great in terms of content, exchange and innovative solutions. We thank all our participants for their enthusiasm and collaboration” says Nicolas Baudry, JEC Group Events Director for North America.

See you at the Composites Solutions for mobility pavilion
@NAIAS Motor Show 2020
June 9 to 11, 2020
COBO CENTER, DETROIT, MI (USA)

About JEC Group

JEC Group is the world’s leading company dedicated entirely to the development of information and business connections channels and platforms supporting the growth and promotion of the composite materials industry. Publisher of the JEC Composites Magazine – the industry’s reference magazine, JEC Group drives global innovation programs and organizes several events in the world, including JEC World (the foremost and world-leading international exhibition dedicated to composite materials and their applications), which takes place every March in Paris. www.jeccomposites.com