Last Wednesday, June 26, LPRC members arrived at the LPRC Collision Summit in the NextRetail Research Center with one goal in mind: crafting and building on the new LPRC Innovate program.

LPRC Innovate was stood up to provide the people, places, and process to support major retailers as they ideate, simulate, and test new digital, people, and design options.

Collision brought together retail executives, solution providers, LPRC team members, and University of Florida faculty to plan the program’s next steps.

After some light breakfast and an introduction to the day’s agenda, Dr. Read Hayes, LPRC Director, gave an overview on the importance of LPRC Innovate. Attendees were all in agreement:  retailers must constantly evolve, evaluate emerging technologies and processes, forecast their impact, and be ready for new opportunities to succeed. To ensure that the program succeeds in its mission, the core advisory team for LPRC Innovate was formed.

LPRC Innovation Specialist Jordan Burchell presented on design thinking, the process of creative problem solving to produce innovative solutions to prototype and test. To make a dent in the issues surrounding the retail industry, human centered design thinking must be applied, and what better way than through the LPRC Innovate Ideation and Simulation Lab (ISL), a space created to provide world-class, problem-solving and immersive training tools to LPRC members and their partners.

Collision attendees toured the updated ISL, which will use state of the art VR/AR/XR technologies that can be connected to an organization’s corporate and field locations. Organizations will use the ISL to simulate solutions and future design options for their retail locations. This means that LPRC retailers and solution partners will be able to:

  • Rapidly simulate different scenarios to see how it affects sales and crime
  • Utilize the ISL to train their associates on best practices based on our research

These unique capabilities will enable members to grow their businesses by leveraging our research process in a new, high-impact, lower-cost way.

The LPRC Collision meeting generated many key takeaways and important next steps for both the LPRC team and its members:

 

 

  • Many projects were conceptualized for the ISL, one of which will be showcased during IMPACT 2019
  • The Digital StoreLab library will be created so members can explore stores and technologies on our website and in VR/AR
  • Our simulation space will focus on integrating augmented reality so that retailers can visualize 3d modeled content in their simulated store environment

We would like to thank our community for attending this event, and for their feedback on the LPRC Innovate program. The LPRC team is excited to show you even more in the upcoming months leading to IMPACT 2019.