Exhibition & Event Association of Australasia (EEAA) Leaders Forum and Conference: Keynote

Earlier this month, I was delighted to take part in this year’s Exhibition & Event Association of Australasia (EEAA) Leaders Forum and Conference.

My keynote was about a personal passion of mine: Moonshots and its place in driving innovation in an exciting and challenging future, and why they’re needed in the coming age of change and the digitization of everything.

The key theme of the discussion was what we can expect the future to hold, as innovation brings us an array of interrelated and ever-more sophisticated technologies, and how this change will affect all industries like the events and exhibition industry to which the keynote attendees were part of.

We then explored what’s required to deliver large-scale transformative innovation and what it takes to deliver an innovation moonshot and how it’s a big risk, big reward bet. A company that wants to play in this space will need to have leaders at every level who have the commitment and the courage to embrace levels of risk that might scare others away. This is how I think of Telstra’s T22 strategy and a big reason why I joined last year. The three-year plan is embraced by everyone in the business and we’re committed to lead the Australian market by simplifying our operations and product set, improving customer experience and reducing our cost base. And we’re very proud of the results in the first year so far.

Drawing on my experience at Deutsche Telekom, I talked about my mission to create a culture of innovation that would enable the company to thrive and survive. If organisations truly want to pursue significant innovation they will need to take an outside-in mentality to predict what customers want before they’re even aware of it themselves. This is always a challenge but not an impossible one. Think about the rollout of the iPod, the smartphone, and what Telstra is now doing with our 5G network. We are anticipating what customers want, before they know they even need it. So when they finally know they need it, we already have it for them.

One way Deutsche Telekom tackled this challenge was to get a different perspective on the future. We commissioned a study that involved workshops with nearly 300 children in their pre-teen and early teen years. We wanted to find out what a digitized world will look like to Gen Z, who may grow up to be future customers. The results? They told us everything will be networked, virtual and augmented reality will be mainstream, digital communication will blend into the physical, personal robots will make their lives easier, and environments will become more intelligent. My guess is that these kids are more right than wrong.

Another important element is to start thinking about creating transformative innovation that is environmentally positive. Not all innovation will do this of course, but we should strive to be better global citizens. Telstra and many other large tech companies are also committing to a similar mission, focusing on using technology to address environmental challenges while also helping our suppliers, customers and the communities we serve to do the same. It’s the right thing to do.

And then finally, this needs to get translated for organisations and employees and how they can make their customers happy.

In a digitized world, customers will expect and demand more from the companies they do business with. At Telstra, we’ve recently conducted qualitative and quantitative research into what that might involve, and the findings were pretty definitive. Our customers expect extraordinary service, seamlessly integrated and accessible technology, and of course, simplicity, flexibility and security.

To conclude the keynote I gave the attendees a few questions to go home with: Think about what an event would look like in the digital world; how AR/VR/MR and high-speed mobile internet will change what events can look like. Imagine the ability to no longer need to travel several hours, or internationally, to attend a large keynote event for work. And imagine just doing this from the office or at home. And of course, what will the event industry and their organisation need to change in order to deal with this new digital reality?