Back from MWC Barcelona
Mauro Carobene
Head of Customer Interactions Suite Tata Communications - CEO at Kaleyra Group - Connecting enterprises with their own customers - Board Member & Advisory Board member
Is MWC still the right format?
I come back last week from Barcelona. I have been almost 15 times in MWC and I always enjoyed it. Lot of old friends, colleagues. Fantastic opportunity to do networking and also lot of excellent parties. Every year, when I fly back home I start to check the pile of business cards and to send follow-up email to most of the persons that I met. This year (as I have to admit also in the past few years) MWC has been for me a success. Lot of great meetings with existing customers/partners. Some new real leads with new potential partner/Customers but more important lot of positive feedback on our story/strategy.
To me the biggest value of MWC is always the comparison with the market. Are we doing something innovative? Are we providing the right answers to the market needs? Overall my feeling is very positive…
…but…
… like every year I also feel that something is not perfect. If you walk around the gran Fira you can always find lot of known brands with similar story. You find lot of “middle age man” – diversity is definitely a big issue in Telco industry, and to be honest we are all getting one year older every year - and it is very difficult to find the real innovation. I saw lot of good attempts from number of companies to bring young people and innovative solutions in MWC but despite big effort I see still lot of focus on the big corporate with great stories but not enough space for innovation. This year overall focus has been around creating ecosystems and around partnership. But the key question for me are the following
If Mark Zuckerberg would have been 20 years old today, at the beginning of Facebook story would Mark be interested in joining an event like MWC?
And if yes would have been easy for Mark to join this year?
And if yes would have been easy for us to realize what he was planning to do?
I have the feeling that without big changes all these kind of events will lose relevancy. Young innovators are interested in “Meet Up”, in “Hackathon”, in “you tube”….. the question is how can we generate interest in them to join our party
Business Development: Driving Growth + Business Value with Digital Business Transformation (DBT) & AIoT Services | Strategic Partnerships | Consultative Sales | Pragmatic Sustainability
6 年Ciao Mauro - great to see that all looks well for you. Maybe you should discuss with Pierre Metrailler, CEO of SpotMe...
CEO INL4Life, Under Construction at INL, World-class Nano-IoT sensors, aggregated, and orchestrated for outcome-based business models, for various industry sectors, helping the economic recovery for industry & society.
6 年Great reflection Mauro, Bravo ????
Head of Global Delivery Center Sofia
6 年Disruptive...You're always a step ahead Mauro :) Great thoughts!?
Consultant Analyst/ Communicator
6 年Perhaps the party is elsewhere. I remember 25 years ago, the world of telecoms was phenomenally exciting, with unstoppable growth in mobile, the WWW and data networks emerging and so on. But 20 years before that, the world of telecoms - the GPO, dozing incumbent operators in every country - was the last place you would have been drawn to as a young innovator, or even engineer. These things do go in waves, and perhaps we're coming to the end of a phenomenon...?