Inside 3D Printing Seoul 2020 Coming this Week in a Hybrid Format

In a sea of virtual events and webinars, this year’s Inside 3D Printing Seoul is taking a different approach to trade shows during these unprecedented times: by holding its event in a hybrid format. I3DP Seoul 2020, taking place this week from November 18-20, will have one day of in-person content at the Korea International Exhibition Center (KINTEX), followed by a day of online content. This is the seventh year for the event, which will definitely be unlike any other.

Inside 3D Printing, the world’s largest professional 3D printing and additive manufacturing event series, first began in New York all the way back in 2013, and now takes place in Seoul, South Korea. Inside 3D Printing Seoul, which last took place in May of 2019, is one of Asia’s foremost additive technology events for the digital transformation of design, development, and manufacturing, and counts 3DPrint.com, 3DR Holdings, SmarTech Analysis, and KINTEX as co-producers.

At last year’s I3DP Seoul, there were over forty speakers from some pretty big names in the industry, such as BASF, GE Additive, Henkel, HP, and Hyundai Motors, along with nearly 90 exhibitors and sponsors and 10,355 attendees. When it was announced that I3DP Seoul would be returning to KINTEX in June of 2020, the projections were even bigger, as you can see in the graphs below, and I imagine no one could have predicted what would happen in the beginning of 2020.

As the COVID-19 pandemic surged and industry events around the world were cancelled or moved to an online format, a survey was conducted with exhibitors and sponsors about the event’s schedule, with over 60% of the exhibitors indicating they wanted to delay the event, with only 35% choosing to attend as planned in June. Travel bans resulting from the crisis were another issue to contend with as well. Weeks before I3DP Seoul 2020 was originally scheduled to take place this summer, the organization announced that it had been postponed until November of 2020 and switched to a hybrid format.

This brings us to the rescheduled event itself, which starts this week as a two-day conference program and doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all, with over 9,000 delegates expected to attend. The first day, November 18th, will be held in-person at the Grand Ballroom (3F) KINTEX 1. Hyeyoung Hwang, the President of AAM, will kick things off with her keynote presentation, “Global Trends in AM Technology and Applications of Smart Factory, and presentations on manufacturing process innovation through 3D printing, as well as the current and future uses of AM in Industry 4.0 & the Smart Factory, will follow. After lunch, attendees will hear about the use of 3D printing in the automotive and medical sectors, and Jackie (JinWook) Kim, Korea Country Manager, Korea for Formlabs, will discuss a digital manufacturing case study. The first day of I3DP Seoul 2020 will end with presentations on AM startups and the industrialization of metal AM.

The presentations on November 19th will all be online, and recorded, without an onsite gathering taking place, and pre-registrants will be provided with recording files and presentation materials. Abhinav Singhal, the Chief Strategy Officer at Thyssenkrupp, will begin the day speaking about 3D printing for industrial applications, and presentations on AM applications in construction, medical/dental, and scaling to mass production with the technology will follow. The metal production workflow will be discussed next, along with how AI can fill the gap of AM, metal 3D printing and 3D printing for maritime applications, and the current state of 3D printing in North America during the pandemic. Two more presentations on medical 3D printing applications, including one related to the coronavirus, will take place in the afternoon, along with aerospace and another discussion on metal 3D printing. The final presentation of the day, by nTopology’s APAC Sales Manager Blake Perez, will focus on digital engineering tools for the future of design and manufacturing.

With 62 exhibitors and plenty of expert speakers, even though Inside 3D Printing Seoul may look a little different this year, it sounds like it will still be the high-quality event we’ve all come to know and expect.