Engage to Stay Out in Front

Humanoid robots, eVTOL aircraft, and additive manufacturing at production scale. Each of these technologies will create real demand for precision gears and bearings, and real disruption for the manufacturers who supply them. The question is whether our industry helps shape that transition or reacts to it afterward.

MPMA’s Emerging Technology committees exist to make sure it’s the former. Here are four ways to be part of that work.

1. Join a Committee

MPMA runs five Emerging Technology committees: Robotics, Electric Vehicle Technology, IIoT, 3D Printing, and the newly formed Air Mobility Technology Committee. Each one meets regularly to discuss the technology through the lens of the gear and bearing manufacturer. As a committee we track developments, vet speakers for MPMA events, bring in expertise for informed discussions, host live events, and produce white papers that put the conversation on the record.

What you get out of a committee isn’t just information—it’s access to a different kind of peer group. The engineers and technical specialists who show up are thinking seriously about where the industry is heading, asking questions that don’t have clean answers yet, and willing to work through them out loud. The Robotics Committee, for example, has drawn component designers, gearbox manufacturers, and systems integrators, all looking at the same technology from different vantage points. The conversation that comes out of a room like that is more useful than anything a single presenter could deliver, because it reflects the actual complexity of bringing a new technology into production.

If your professional network is deep in one area but narrow across disciplines, the committees are a practical way to change that.

2. Attend a Live Webinar

MPMA’s live webinars bring in outside experts to give our audience an honest assessment of where a new technology stands—not the press release version. Recent sessions have featured Airwave’s real-world application of AI in safety glasses and Liebherr’s overview of their new SkiveFinishing process for internal gears.

The live format matters. You can ask questions, hear what your peers are wondering about, and get answers in real time. The presenters we invite are chosen from committee member input—they can separate signal from noise and they are candid about what is unknown.

3. Watch On-Demand Webinars

Not every schedule allows for a live session, and sometimes the most useful webinar is one you missed six months ago. Every MPMA Emerging Technology webinar is recorded and available for free on demand on the MPMA website, spanning topics from cybersecurity frameworks affecting manufacturers to new gearbox innovations entering production.

If you are new to a topic, the on-demand library is a practical place to start. An hour with the right presenter can do more to calibrate your thinking than a year of reading headlines.

4. Meet Emerging Tech Speakers at the MPMA SNL and FTM

The Strategic Networking & Leadership Forum (SNL) is where these conversations get personal—a smaller, more focused setting than the MPT Expo, designed for the kind of back-of-the-room discussions that don’t happen on a conference stage. Some of the most valuable insights from our program have come not from presenters but from the conversations those presenters started.

This year, for the first time, the Fall Technical Meeting (FTM) will have a second concurrent track focused on emerging technologies, innovative solutions, and real-world applications. Join us in October.

Join the Conversation

None of this works without people willing to engage, show up, ask hard questions, and share what they know from the floor of real manufacturing operations. If that sounds like you, please join us, or reach out to me directly at doran@motionpower.org.