One of the highlights each year at Lightfair is the Product Innovation Awards. Lighting manufacturers submit their new products for review by a board of lighting designers and other industry professionals. The winners are announced on the morning of the first day of LightFair, held this year at Chicago’s McCormick Place.
The LFI Innovation Awards offer a glimpse of how well lighting companies can craft lighting solutions by harnessing the various technological tools now at their disposal -- super-efficient LEDs, tunable light, app-based control, LiFi and other technologies. It’s always also interesting to see just how many new companies won individual categories. While well-known brands like Zumtobel Lighting, Philips/Gardco, and Acuity were winners, some very small companies not quite on the industry radar were category winners, too. Winners of the four major awards in the LightFair International Innovation Awards 2018 were as follows:
Product Innovation Award Winner
Ledra Brands: Vector lighting fixture
Downlight that uses molecular orientation to enable dynamic beam shaping from 10 degrees to 55 degrees through an app or wall switch.
Technical Innovation Award Winner
Crestron Electronics: CCT & Lux Sensor (GLS-LCCT)
Small outdoor IP67 rated sensor that will determine the outdoor light level and color temperature to drive the indoor lighting to match.
Design Excellence Award
Acuity Brands: FlexConnect
Discreet, flexible field-configurable linear tape system with miniature silicone optics for precise beam control.
Judges’ Citation Award
Lumefficient: Resilient
LiFi downlight allows devices to connect wirelessly to the internet using light spectrum offering unprecedented data and bandwidth.
Next year’s LFI Innnovation Awards will be held in Philadelphia on May 21-23.
About the Author
Jim Lucy
Editor-in-Chief, Electrical Wholesaling & Electrical Marketing
Over the past 40-plus years, hundreds of Jim’s articles have been published in Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and Electrical Construction & Maintenance magazine on topics such as electric vehicles, solar and wind development, energy-efficient lighting and local market economics. In addition to his published work, Jim regularly gives presentations on these topics to C-suite executives, industry groups and investment analysts.
He launched a new subscription-based data product for Electrical Marketing that offers electrical sales potential estimates and related market data for more than 300 metropolitan areas. In 1999, he published his first book, “The Electrical Marketer’s Survival Guide” for electrical industry executives looking for an overview of key market trends.
While managing Electrical Wholesaling’s editorial operations, Jim and the publication’s staff won several Jesse H. Neal awards for editorial excellence, the highest honor in the business press, and numerous national and regional awards from the American Society of Business Press Editors. He has a master’s degree in communications and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, N.J. (now Rowan University) and studied electrical design at New York University and graphic design at the School for Visual Arts.