Thought Experiment #22: Conference Colliders - Adding an [experiment track]

Update - what your colleagues are saying:

"really liked it! We did do a big innovation conference a couple of years ago and one of the sentiments was, despite being a great event, there was a missed opportunity in terms of having 400 amazing innovators in the room from around the world who could actually have come together to create." Head of Innovation

"Nice review of conferences and their use as innovation accelerators..." Open Innovation Lead - Accenture

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We've all experienced the pleasure and the frustration of large events, from strategic offsites to conferences. Millions if not billions of economic value is gathered together, largely in one big room.

These large events come in all shapes and forms, with the majority of them: fostering inspiration, 'spraying' out knowledge from speakers and panellists, offering a dozen or so sessions trying to meet the huge variety of attendees' needs, and with little value-add engagement pre or post conference. The amount of organisational effort that goes into running an international conference often runs into thousand+ hours, all for the purpose of a day or two.

As the attendees disperse, so does the potential, that one-room held. New 'important' ideas are quickly overpowered by the 'urgent' work. Inspiration is short-lived. In the end real change is hard to see.

Having delivered sessions at conferences, been an attendee at many, and having designed and ran an unconference to Silicon Valley (skip to number 2) - I would hazard an educated but unsubstantiated guess, from the attendee perspective, that only 30% of the value of conferences is realised.

In the next 5 minutes, we focus on the question: How and why should we treat conferences as incubators of change?

----------- why, first:

To answer this question we have to ask another question - what are the attendees' 'jobs to be done'? Although there are as many reasons as there are attendees, they are commonly broken down into two tracks - people are there for learning and development or networking for all sorts of reasons (sales, recruitment, reputation, brand etc), or a combination of the two.

What if conferences actively designed for a third-group of people in that room, the potential innovators.

This third track is for the X% (put your own figure here) of attendees that are aspiring, struggling or promising innovators.

The third track is to help these attendees to validate or invalidate their hypotheses with an ecosystem of people (customers, users, suppliers, investors etc) that are there in one room.

Rather than fit into a prescribed agenda, the third-track is all about putting the innovators' agenda at the centre.

It's for those who do not want or need generic sharing of information, for those who don't see themselves as consumers of the conference, but for those who want to be active co-creators of the potential that exists in that one large room.

The third track is not about adding networking slots of 15-30 minutes after all the 'important' sessions are allocated their time. It's not about creating an unstructured, serendipity driven, hands-off approach. It's not about creating an unconference, with open white space for attendees to fill in.

It's about deliberately engineering space and time so meaningful relationships can form before, during and after the conference - to help innovators design, validate and execute experiments. Why experiments? Because it can be the smallest unit of change.

------- How:

We offer just one possibility in how to design this third-track:

Before-conference - Experiment design:

We recommend running what we call [experiment] incubators. These are 1-hour sessions with each attendee (those who want it), 2 weeks prior to the event itself, where you help them design and visualise their experiment onto one page, help them see the weak areas of their thinking, develop 3 key hypotheses that they should test at the conference, and make connections to 3 people who are also going to be attending -who can help them validate some aspects of their experiment.

During conference - Experiment validation:

There many different formats of sessions that can be purposefully designed to help the attendees/innovators validate some aspect of their experiments. For example:

• A great, small-group feedback session, like those run by House of Genius.
• Another example is a session which allows innovators to test their value proposition with up to 10 potential customers with 10-minute speed-validation. I attended one of these at Reconverse. I noticed myself iterating my value proposition on the fly - and that level of validation and iteration was incredible.
• A 'Got a problem/Get a solution' format.
• Adapting hackathons - instead of producing prototypes, help innovators to redesign their experiments.

Post-conference - Experiment execution:

This is key. We recommend to pick the top, say 10-20 experiments, that show the greatest potential. Help these innovators turn their experiments into outcomes, through what we call [Outcome] Incubators. An eight-week support program delivered remotely.

These [Outcome] Incubators help with execution. They can be used by conference organisers to capture and communicate stories of real change.

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In terms of costs and funding, there are at least two options: 1) you can charge your attendees to access this track if you want to gauge true levels of need and demand. 2) You can submit a case to your corporate sponsors to fund this track. I would bet my prized possessions (excluding wife and kids) that a sponsor would get more value of funding this track than any other track.

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For conferences to realise the 70%+ (or your own best guess) of the missed potential, it needs to start with those designing, organising, running, or attending these events - to treat conferences as potential incubators of innovators and their experiments. The continuity of (pre, during, and post) support is the biggest missing piece - and experiments offer one such structure to achieve change.

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Call to Action: IF you see any value in this blog, please 'like/share' it, so others in your network may come across it. Many thanks.

If you're interested in adding a third (experiment) track to your conferences or events that help your attendees to design, validate and execute experiments - please reach out to me at [email protected] - happy to share more lessons learned.