Innovation conferences: Are they worth attending?
It is no secret that I have mixed feelings about innovation conferences. I have attended many but have grown tired of them in recent years for reasons that I will try to explain below. I definitely believe in the value of sharing knowledge so I ask you to see this as a discussion starter on how to maximize the value of innovation conferences and even better – how to improve them.
1. Organizers focus more on the ego of the speakers and the exposure of their sponsors rather than the outcome of the participants. Look at the many bright people you have in the room. Why do the organizers not make a better effort in getting them involved during the conference? It is ok that thought leaders who really have something new to tell us get the full spotlight, but often you have mediocre speakers who care more about their own ego than the participants. This is not good enough. The organizers should become better at facilitating interactive sessions. The new social networking offerings could add a lot of value once we find the right ways of applying this.
And who really cares about the sponsored luncheon speakers or the introduction speakers who get 10 minutes to present their company before they give the 30-second introduction of the speaker? BlackBerries really go to work here. The only reason to accept these “interruptions” is that they help keep the costs down. I often wonder if they are worth it.
2. Networking is just too difficult. Today, you seldom get a participant list in advance of the event. Many events do not even distribute this at the event making it very difficult to optimize your networking efforts even though this is one of the key reasons for people to attend in the first place. I understand the organizers want to protect their marketing databases, but the price of this privacy can be too high.
3. The practitioner/consultant ratio is too low. When I talk with the practitioners – the innovation leaders – on this topic I feel sorry for them. At the recent World Innovation Forum in New York, a good friend of mine who is VP of Innovation in a globally recognized company was approached many times. All the time by consultants trying to sell him something. He hardly exchanged any insights with peers.
This one is a bit touchy for me. I do not consider myself as a consultant although I make my living providing services to innovation leaders. I understand some practitioners might view me as one of the “bad” guys. My advice to consultants and others like me is to drop the hard sell. If you want to engage with the practitioners do it in an intelligent way that focuses more on how you can help the person rather than what you can sell. If you do not have much to offer here beside a hard sell, make it short. Very short and to the point.
A word to the organizers is that they should pay more attention to the mix of consultants and practitioners and they should take actions that favour the practitioners. One obvious action could be to limit the number of consultants even though this might hurt budgets. I am sure it will be worth it when you try to sell the conference next time.
4. Many organizers only focus on content – which can often be found online. What is our reason for bringing people together? Organizers should ponder a bit on this. It should be more than just content which is so easily accessible online. I recently listened to C.K. Prahalad talking about co-creation and the importance of providing an experience. Organizers should learn from this.
5. Too few companies send delegations. Innovation is about team work and if your company really want new insights and inspiration on innovation it is useless to let employees decide for themselves which conferences to attend. We all know the feeling of going to a conference, getting all excited and inspired only to lose this feeling almost immediately you get back to the office. You have no one to share your learning with making it extremely difficult to anchor the new insights in your company. Executives responsible for innovation should craft a strategy on how to develop the organizational innovation competences and this should conferences and other educational offerings. Some organizers also have an untapped market here. Not all organizers have learned that it makes better sense trying to sell corporate packages rather than just selling to the individuals.
6. Where is the value proposition? Innovation requires a strong value proposition focusing on the needs of customers or users. This often lacks with conferences. A good example of a strong value proposition is the World Innovation Forum. Yes, they do have some of the general faults as mentioned above, but they do one thing very well. They bring the world’s best innovation thought leaders together at one event. The concentration of quality is so high that it makes this event one that I look forward to and even more important – I will recommend the event to others. Other conferences could look more at the needs within the innovation community and offer something specific and valuable. There are too many me-too conferences.
I could probably think of more reasons why innovation conferences – or conferences in general – have a broken business model, but I will stop here hoping we can get a discussion started.
Good post stefan. I agree with you 100%, even never having been to an innovation conference. What I’m agreeing with then is that conferences, in general, have all the same issues you mentioned above. SXSW overcomes some of the issues above, and perhaps unconferences to a larger degree. But I think the issue is with the “business” of organizing conferences, and the competing interests that come with that. If you are ever in NYC, let’s develop our own innovation conference and show them how it’s done.
some interesting observations which I will take on board in organising our Innovate 09 conference in October – the key point I agree with you on is focussing on the outcome of the participants and not the ego of the speakers
Thanks for sharing this, Stefan. My question: was there any innovating?
It seems odd to conduct a “world innovation conference” but not actually DO any innovation during the conference.
that is right Stefan, most of the times those are not the innovation conferences but the sales conferences. People who come there are more the professional seminar goers. Now some private companies are organizing such confeences and inviate the standard speakers & audiences with different topic names. Then also these are successful, the reason I observed that participating companies think even if one good contact comes then money spent is worth
While i see merit in attending innovation conferences (definitely shows some new perspectives), what I have seen is poor follow up post attending such conferences. I myself atteneded 2 such conferences conducted by IDEO and Standford University, but what happened post this – nothing. The companies who sponsor perosns for these conferences also must be clear of the expectations – which is sadly not the case most of the times. Hence, i guess the failure is more with the particpants than with the organizers, speakers, etc
I totally agree on this. I would also say that in Italy, and in my experience, most of the organization formally supposed to support innovation actually are there support primarly themselves.
Stefan, I agree wholeheartedly with all the points you make.
So how can the shortcomings of the traditional conference model be addressed?
Unconferencing, using
methods such as Open
Space Technology or BarCamp,
is one approach that seems to be gaining ground. For many conference organisers,
the idea of doing the whole event in Open Space is a bridge too far. However,
there are three main alternatives: 1) Keep the PowerPoint presentations and
have a parallel Open Space strand. 2) Embed a 90 or 120 minute period of Open
Space into the conference programme. 3) The entire conference is Open Space,
with a mix of invited speakers and impromptu sessions. The challenge with this option is that one or more speakers may find that no one wants to watch their presentations!
Here’s another approach that’s likely to be much more acceptable t the conference industry as it’s an incremental innovation. It’s the approach adopted by Jeffrey Hyman, who runs the Food & Drink Innovation Network here in the UK. FDIN, which Jeffrey describes as “a cross between a best practice club and a trade association”, runs monthly seminars at whichthe large majority of the participants are practitioners. This is the FDIN conferencing approach:
Before the seminar begins, the speakers meet for a breakfast briefing. Participants sit at round tables, and before every break they discuss the content of the presentations they’ve just seen. Together they formulate questions for the panel session that takes place late afternoon, before people head for home. When they return from the refreshment and lunch breaks, Jeffrey insists that they sit on a different table so that they can interact with a new set of people. The exchange of business cards is de rigueur. After the panel session a volunteer is invited to pull a name out of the hat, and the winner is handed a big bottle of champagne. Jeffrey calls it the Endurance Award (or something like that), and he cheerfully admits to participants that it’s a cunning device to keep people in their seats until the end of the seminar.
I once suggested to Jeffrey, with tongue in cheek, that he launch a sister organisation, the Conference Innovation Network, for the conferencing and event management industry. Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea.
Thank you for getting this conversation going. It has certainly stirred my passion and I’m looking forward to seeing what other ideas your correspondents propose.
I guess, we all miss the opportunity of coming together and becoming more than the sum of our parts. As it’s been said, too much focus on egos, money making and the botched ritual of networking at the expense of new ideas.
Where I would try to fix the balance? I’d start with the moderator(s); they should be educated and natively possess, or have internalized by now, the art of dialectical inquiry.
I very much experience what you are talking about, Stephan, with the exception of two conferences, which happen to be two of the innovation conferences that have been around the longest.
The oldest of all, but still incredibly relevant, is the Creative Problem Solving Institute put on by the Creative Education Association that was started back in the ’50’s It’s coming up shortly, this time in Boston. An incredibly deep conference with multiple tracks, deep interaction opportunities and none of the “buy a speaking slot” dynamics of many other conferences. Look it up here:
http://www.cpsioconference.com
There are offshoots of this conference in many places, notably in Italy http://www.creaconference.com/EN/index.html and South Africa http://www.sacreativity.com/
CEF also is the publisher of the only real peer reviewed journal in the industry: The Journal of Creative Behavior.
http://www.creativeeducationfoundation.org/jcb.shtml
The other is the conference for the American Creativity Conference (which also has been held in Singapore, go figure) which has a more normal keynote / workshop format, but lots of teaching and not much consultant shilling. Both CPSI and ACA have conference cultures that bring you back if you provide value to attendees, not necessarily because you provide dollars to the sponsor organization. Find them here: http://www.amcreativityassoc.org/index1.htm
I have to say though, even after many years in the world of innovation practice, I find value at many of the conferences that you are describing, even amid all of the need to sell that some consultants experience. I’m there to learn and share value, and I figure when paying work for my firm comes out of that it will arise naturally, but not via normal selling behavior that can work, but is most often off-putting.
Stefan, I am less concerned about the format of innovation conferences and more concerned about the message that gets pushed out. Most speakers are selling the message – “do more, try more, take more risks, run more experiments, use venture capital industry processes, run ideation workshops, etc”.
My own research suggests that, at least in some categories of innovation, most companies are doing too much, supporting too many foolish projects and wasting time and money.
Maybe you could make this a topic of a future blog.
Andrew, Ashridge Business School
Stefan,
In today’s economic situation companies are constantly looking at new avenues to improve the bottom line. To that extent there is big expectation from the participants. They come to such seminars and conferences in the hope to hear something which they can go back and implement in their organizations. Sadly, they hear the same thing being churned out in a variety of ways. There is not much achieved at the end of the day. People go back to the routine they are used to as there is no followup from these sort of seminars to know if the project started was successful or if they hit any roadblocks.
So, my suggestion is to have a followup seminar with the participants which will clearly prove if they were successful with project on innovation
at their end.
V Krish, President, Innovation & Research
Thanks for all your great comments!
A discussion on the World Innovation Forum prompted me to add point 6 – Where is the value proposition? to this post. WIF actually do a great job here and to Drew’s question I can say they did bring something new to the table. It was a Bloggers Hub that allowed many from the innovation blogging community to get together and at the same spread the wisdom of the speakers. Quite interesting!
Jack, you are right that the Unconferencing methods are worth looking into. Thanks for bringing our attention to this.
Andrew, the messages – and thus the content – is quite important. You made me think on how to address this in a blog post. I might take you up on that.
Stefan
Good insights. I too speak on innovative thinking at conferences and noticed how ‘non’ innovative they were in their design. I started to look at the conference planning model and determined that much was invested in organizing the logistics yet little was invested in the design of what people would do at the conference. This led me to bring an innovation perspective to the industry and write a book, “Seven Rules for Designing More Innovative Conferences.” My point is that every event should create a Learning and Engagement Strategy before they develop the logistical plan. My rules were conceived to prompt new thinking in the design of an event:
Rule 1 The experts at your conference are in the audience, not on the stage.
Rule 2 Think Return on Investment…even though it is hard to measure.
Rule 3 Design your conference with Logistics and Learning.
Rule 4 Learning objectives drive the design of your content.
Rule 5 Always use the brainpower of an audience to create something.
Rule 6 Put structure into your networking and mingling opportunities.
Rule 7 Assume that your conference participants have weak skills for participating in a conference.
See http://www.InnovativeConferences.com
i agree entirely with your post.
i would add three more observations.
1.
the organizers never seem to think about what the attendees need. they just go for the biggest names (or the biggest paying sponsors) that they can get. after all, their performance metric is filling seats and/or making money, not providing value.
2.
the well-known speakers just regurgitate stuff from their books which everyone has read more than once anyway (once in the book itself and then multiple times on the internet afterwards.)
3.
the organizers never apply standards to the speakers – they put up with whatever the speaker produces (which is often of terrible quality.) whenever i am asked to speak at a conference, i try to ascertain what the organizers want from me, who the audience is, what their expectations are, and so on. replies range from “i don’t know” to “say whatever you want”.
graham
[...] pero cierto-, me encontré un post de fecha 7 de Mayo en el blog de Stefan Lindegaard titulado “Innovation conferences: Are they worth attending?” donde varias de sus reflexiones coinciden con las mías (se supone que hasta las conferencias que [...]
This isn’t an isolated situation unique to innovation conferences. The quality of almost all conferences, regardless of the field-of-study, seems abysmally low today. Good post.