Arrow Electronics puts innovation on display

Arrow Electronics is a tech solutions provider that's putting innovation on display at this year's CES show in Las Vegas.

The company is showcasing technologies including 3D depth-mapping in advanced driver assistance systems for autonomous vehicles, as well as artificial intelligence-based visual analytics tools that could be applied to advanced medical research and retail.

Arrow Electronics is also demonstrating how innovators can get their prototypes created and manufactured, enabling growth through IoT connectivity and lifecycle solutions, for example, and reach a mass market.

The company, which opened its first open lab at Hong Kong Science Park in 2016, says it is committed to empowering innovators and engineers with access to design tools, resources, and engineering expertise that they often lack.

The open lab has served as a base for more than 800 engineers who have solved problems and accelerated idea-to-prototype-to-production journey.  Arrow is currently expanding its global network of open labs in major technology and innovation hubs around the world, including China, India, Israel, and the U.S. later in the year.

"Innovators and engineers in every corner of the world are constantly at a race not just against current or emerging competitors, but also against themselves," comments Arrow Electronics' chief marketing officer W. Victor Gao.

"How to maximise the impact of their products, how to tweak the design to make user-interface more intuitive, how to scale for more sustainable growth, how to capture adjacent market opportunities, and how to rapidly broaden their footprint to other geographical locations.

He adds that Arrow Electronics is able to offer the kind of innovation partnership that it takes to keep creators and makers ahead of the pack, with "critical resources and support of a well-connected, incredibly broad global technology company.

In 2017, Arrow launched an exclusive partnership with Indiegogo, offering entrepreneurs the opportunity to gain flash-funding of up to $50,000 in benefits. The funding would help entrepreneurs win at prototyping and manufacturing innovative products. The company has attracted thousands of startups to the platform in 2018.

"Making the benefits of technology more broadly accessible in the mass market ought to be as much a part of the product design as the technology itself," says W. Victor Gao.

 Arrow Electronics guides innovation forward for over 150,000 of the world's leading manufacturers of technology used in homes, business and daily life. The company maintains a network of more than 345 locations serving over 80 countries.