LPPDE North America 2026 – Seattle

Recent years have shown how important supply chains and manufacturing are to our daily lives. Even great products can fail if production has problems—delays keep customers waiting, and poor quality hurts trust. As companies rethink their strategies and focus more on manufacturing, we must look at how we create and deliver value. This year’s Lean Product & Process Development Exchange North America will explore the key role of Process Development.

Our 2026 theme, “Machinery of Innovation,” asks us to think about two aspects of innovation:

First, we want to build product development systems that create new ideas and solutions again and again—smoothly and reliably, like a well-run machine.

Second, we know that every great product depends on the processes that make it real: the production systems, supply chains, factories, and machines that turn ideas into products for customers.

As we learned in our June Virtual Series: what we don’t learn during development, we suffer in manufacturing. This fall, we’ll look closely at how learning happens in product and process development. Join us in Seattle, September 28 – October 1, 2026, to share ideas, practical tools, and inspiration with experts and peers from around the world. Let’s build the Machinery of Innovation together.

Andy Wagner, Conference Chair

Marcos Esterman, Conference Co-Chair