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.