Engineering Events
There may be no better place in the world of mobility engineering to interact and exchange ideas with the best minds in the business than an SAE Engineering Event.
That is apparently the thoughts of nearly the nearly 20,000 people who attended an SAE Engineering Event in 2018.
Total attendance for the 28 events held last year was 19,625. The total number of exhibitors and sponsor companies was 687.
The number of events increased by two from the 26 produced in 2017.
The anchor of SAE’s Engineering Events was WCX18 – World Congress Experience in Detroit, Michigan, which drew 200 exhibitors and 10,000 attendees from more than 49 nations. Nearly 1,500 technical papers and presentations were made during the three-day event.
“SAE Engineering Events are the finest events of their kind,” said Jim Forlenza, Group Director of SAE Events. “We continue to bring together the best and brightest in the field of mobility engineering. When that happens, innovative ideas are exchanged. When innovative ideas are exchanged, the world of mobility engineering changes for the better. In the end, everybody wins.”
Examples of this exchange of ideas at WCX included:
- The first-ever Pitch Pit, which featured seven presentations of innovative technologies;
- Leadership Summit at the Exchange;
- Tech Hub at the Exchange;
- The Knowledge Bar: and
- The Learning Lab.
The 2018 portfolio was designed to align more with the strategic initiatives of SAE, with particular emphasis on connected vehicles. Connected and Autonomous Vehicle topics took center stage at eight events, while three new events were created for 2019.
Conference speakers are more diverse as SAE sought a diversity of thoughts and perspectives. The events team continued to seek strategic partnership opportunities and used these relationships to create new geographic opportunities, such as programs in Israel. These activities help grow the SAE brand abroad and continue to create relationships with non-traditional entities.
Engineering Events created a pricing catalogue to identify operational costs from a regional perspective, including AV, F&B, and labor costs, helping create more accurate forecasting and budgeting, while identifying past, present, and future trends.
Engineering Events also collaborated with Sales and Marketing to create better lead management services. The creation of pre-event webinars helped promote event registration and subsequently created hundreds of new leads and opt-ins.