GARPA briefing

Citation

Gibson, I. (2007), "GARPA briefing", Rapid Prototyping Journal, Vol. 13 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/rpj.2007.15613aab.003

GARPA briefing

The most recent GARPA summit meeting was held in Helsinki, Finland, in conjunction with the International Conference on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing, organized by the Finnish Rapid Prototyping Association, FIRPA (www.isv.hut.fi/icrpmf), September 2006 (Figure 1). I was honoured to attend as a keynote speaker at this event, which was my first trip to Finland, and hopefully not the last. My congratulations go out to Jukka Tuomi and his team for organizing an excellent conference with a host of wonderful presentations. This event was the start of a revelation to me where I noted a distinct change in the attitude towards GARPA and I have also gained a real understanding of the potential this alliance has.

Figure 1 Attendees at the GARPA Global Summit 2006 Front row: Jukka Tuomi (Finland), Deon de Beer (South Africa), Paulo Bartolo (Portugal), and Kirsi Kukko (Finland). Back row: Zhuo Xiong (China), Seppo Syrjälä (Finland), Ian Gibson (Singapore), Bruno Le Razer (France), Olivier Jay (Denmark), Terry Wohlers (USA), Hannu Kaikonen (Finland), Tillmann Paul (Germany), Ismo Mäkelä (Finland), Gideon Levy (Switzerland), Olli Nyrhilä (Finland), and Tatu Syvänen (Finland)

As I have just written, my first indication came from the GARPA global summit meeting itself. FIRPA were very keen to turn their usual local association conference into something much bigger and much more meaningful. Through GARPA, FIRPA were able to transform this conference into an event that attracted delegates from far and wide, including South Africa, US, China and Singapore, as well as from most countries in Europe. It's fair to say that FIRPA could have achieved this without the aid of GARPA, but it is also quite clear that the alliance was a very effective way of attracting delegates from very far away. The summit meeting, which was held on the evening before the conference began, was attended by representatives from 10 different countries. Many of these representatives had made special efforts to ensure they attended this summit meeting. Much of the discussion during that meeting was about how GARPA can promote and strengthen its position as an influence within the global RP community. Maybe there's a need to consolidate the activities of GARPA by obtaining funding to support a permanent, full- time secretariat. I think that eventually this will happen, so please watch this space for developments...

Further indication of the awareness of GARPA from the wider community has come from the increasing number of activities that GARPA are being asked to endorse. As well as the numerous RP conferences, like the FIRPA one and the ICMA to be held in Singapore in May 2007 (www.icma07.org), GARPA has been approached by a number of professional conference organizers to assist in promoting and endorsing their conferences. Euromold (www.euromold.com) is a huge exhibition held in Frankfurt every year around November/December that has numerous conferences and workshops attached to it, many of which are very relevant to RP users and researchers. In fact, Euromold has been associated with GARPA for a few years now, through GARPA co-founder Terry Wohlers who presents regularly at this event. Product Development Excellence Week however was a new event held in Shanghai in November 2006 (www.pdewchina.com), organized by Mena Maxson. The Rapid Product Development conference in Kuala Lumpur was another new event held in December 2006 and organized by Marcus Evans (www.marcusevans.com). Both of these companies found it beneficial to be associated with GARPA and kindly offered GARPA members a discount on the conference fees. Sure, there are numerous other GARPA sponsored conferences and activities, but the main reason I single these two events out is because they contacted GARPA from outside the standard RP community. I think GARPA is working.

Ian Gibson