When I walk Light + Building in Frankfurt this week, I’ll be looking broadly for one thing: Is there any ambition on display from the architectural lighting industry as a whole?

I spent the first 25+ years of my career in architectural lighting. For several years now I’ve believed the industry is in a dark place, having been decimated by a globalized race to the bottom on cost. The result is an industry that seems to have lost much of its capacity, and much of its collective willpower, to bring real innovation to market.

The rapid progress of US, EU, and Japanese LED innovators in the 2000s led China to elevate LED lighting as a national strategic industry in its 2011–2015 Five Year Plan. It aggressively subsidized and invested in LED lighting manufacturing.

The consequence? The world switched to incredibly efficient LED lighting far faster than even the rosiest optimists predicted. But it also pushed the entire lighting industry into a fixation on cost, destroying the pricing power of nearly every category of electric lighting.

The replacement lamp market collapsed. The “big three” Philips, Osram, and GE, which once funded R+D across the industry, effectively disappeared in their historical roles. Western VC investment around the hype of LED lighting dried up. The promised IoT revolution never materialized, and that investment dried up as well. Lighting manufacturing shifted massively to China, leaving the industry with a wasteland of cheap, disposable LED fixtures across every tired commodity category.

Worse, even after all that disruption, the industry remains full of non-value-added middlemen who skim off the top the lowest-risk cash flow and reinvest none of it into daring new products, new categories, or new technology development.

In contrast, when I attend Integrated Systems Europe in Barcelona each year, the A/V industry is absolutely booming. Innovation is racing forward across countless product and segment categories. New companies constantly enter the market. Major players continue to invest heavily in product development and marketing. There is constant M&A, constant spinouts, constant energy.
Sadly, it reminds me of the architectural lighting industry from roughly 2005–2015.

At some point, isn’t the architectural lighting industry going to get tired of being a commodity wasteland? Isn’t it going to wake up and realize that innovation in the built environment is possible, that innovation is desired, and that innovation can create wealth? Channel innovation. Product innovation. Category innovation. Technology innovation. Will I see any of it at Light + Building on Wednesday?

On Thursday I’ll be speaking about the potential of AI in lighting at the VLDC Future Forum. Hopefully the conversation pushes people to think bigger, think differently, and start imagining a brighter future for the industry.