AIPIMA’s international conference discusses disruptive innovations and trends in print

The conference was hosted at Hotel Westin in Mumbai.

“We are all aware of how Uber, Airbnb, Zomato and Book My Show broke into an area of conventional business, to enter our daily life. Likewise, unconventional new social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn have created their own space out of nowhere changing the conventional communication system,” said BB Sen, president of AIPIMA. “The conference presentations made an attempt to suggest right strategies by which we can hope to deliver different options to the print industry.”

BB Sen, president of AIPIMA

Narendra Paruchuri, chairman and managing director of Pragati Offset delivered examples of how technology has been changing in his keynote presentation. Paruchuri said, “Personal computers displaced typewriters, email transformed and later social networking transformed our ways of communicating.” He added, “The moment we say disruption, we think about Uber, Airbnb, Ola, Netflix. By themselves, they would not be able to do much. It was Internet communication technology (ICT) and GPS which played an important role, and it’s the advancement of these two technologies which made these disruptions possible.”

Narendra Paruchuri, chairman and managing director of Pragati Offset

Paruchuri narrated how a software tool Pragati developed transformed the way estimates were prepared. Telephone moved from trunk calls to STD, which made communication easy. “I remember, the word in the printing circle was that, Pragati quotation STD par deta hai,” said Paruchuri. “The next change came with email, because of which the postman comes to us, once in a while and the greeting cards industry was sent for a toss.”

Back to discussing print technology, Paruchuri spoke of how his company moved from letter types to photocomposing system to the present day CTP, these technological innovations have only made print operations easy. “Disruptive technology for me is: the introduction of a product or service into an established industry that performs better and generally at lower costs than the existing offering thereby displaying the market leader in that particular market space in that industry,” Paruchuri said.

The keynote address was followed by presentation by Mohan Dewan, trademark attorney on global scenario on patents and India’s current contribution; Pankaj Bhardwaj, GM at Avery on substrates and coating; Ruediger Baur, head of global technical marketing at Clariant; SM Ramprasad, EVP for graphic arts at Fujifilm; Torsten Schmelich, regional head of technical services for graphic arts, Eckart; Amit Shah, managing director, Spectrum Scan; Indrajit Bhattacharya, technical service manager at Miwon on chemistry of LED UV curing inks; Jose Novo of Toyo Ink on sustainability; Anatoly Bytsenko of Full Systembau, and the highlight of the conference a panel discussion conducted by Ramu Ramanathan, editor of PrintWeek India with Ankit Tanna of Printmann, Amar Chhajet and Marzban Thanevala of Huhtamaki and Ashwin Maheshwari of Avenue Graphics.