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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.