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Europe’s top convention bureaus are positioning themselves more strategically as platforms for crowdsourcing and co-locating conferences in aligned industries.
London & Partners is doing this at the local level by aggressively clustering London Tech Week with as many other tech conference as possible. That gives smaller events a bigger stage and access to global marketing, and it drives greater worldwide exposure around London’s booming tech industry year-over-year.
The inaugural London Tech Week in 2014 launched as somewhat of an experiment, developed initially as a collaboration between New York ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg and London’s mayor at the time, Boris Johnson. The two men saw an opportunity to leverage London’s burgeoning startup scene in Shoreditch’s Tech City district in East London as a catalyst for economic development for the entire capital.
Primarily, they wanted to ensure that the city remained competitive with the surging European startup communities in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
In June, London Tech Week 2016 hosted more than 45,000 attendees at 300-plus sessions in 207 venues. Target attendance is 100,000 attendees in the next three years.
The lead organizations behind the event are: London & Partners, the Department for International Trade, the Tech UK trade association, Tech City, the ExCel London convention center, and the Tech London Advocates group, consisting of more than 3,500 tech and knowledge industry professionals.
Promoted as “The First Festival of Health, Travel, Retail, Advertising, Fashion, Food, and Financial Tech,” the 5-day event has more than doubled in size in three years because it’s designed as an open-source event platform.
Meaning, London & Partners encourages any tech company to create their own events around the parent event during the same timeframe, which the bureau will promote under the London Technology Week banner. The strategy is similar in some ways to South by Southwest in Austin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
For London Tech Week 2017, London & Partners is joining forces with the KNext365 portfolio of tech and scientific conferences, bring six additional events into the London Tech Week fold, including Apps World, 5G World, and VR & AR World Summit.
Looking ahead, the bureau wants to copy that strategy by clustering events in other industry sectors, ranging from the fashion to financial industries, while still focusing on the tech innovations within each. Part of that strategy includes founding and funding the Traveltech Lab in partnership with The Trampery co-working company in 2014 to support local startups and attract foreign talent in tourism and hospitality.
We sat down with Tracy Halliwell, director of conventions/major events at London & Partners, during the IMEX America meetings industry tradeshow in Las Vegas last month for deeper insight into the bureau’s clustering strategy.
Skift: What was London & Partners’ role in the development of London Tech Week?
Tracy Halliwell: When we became London & Partners, we moved from being just a convention bureau to becoming more of an economic development organization. So we started to work with people like our colleagues in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) who are responsible for attracting new investments into London. We started to work with the guys who were attracting students into London, and suddenly we started to talk about the whole industry, academic, and government ecosystem in the city.
What really interested the politicians and our funders was how to leverage our tech sector, which employs 340,000 people now, just in London. That’s a worldwide expertise cluster that you can really do something with, because we’re becoming really good at attracting this kind of stuff to London.
So within the meetings and events world, if we can align all those clusters, we’ve got a much better story to attract meeting planners to London, because there are all these centers of expertise. In terms of the tech sector, when you’re trying to put together a tech meeting of some kind, whether that’s a Salesforce or Microsoft user group conference, or a hackathon or a venture capitalist meeting, you can call on those 340,000 people as your delegate base, as speakers and content programmers, right there in the city.
Skift: And the aggregate value of the clusters is more than the sum of the parts for networking opportunities.
Halliwell: Yes, the networking opportunities are considerable. We call it a bit of a “dinner party culture.” In London, you can be at a dinner party and you’ll be sitting next to someone in the tech sector or finance or political, or film and media, or life sciences, who all live and work and develop things in London. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. In the States, the media world might be in L.A., while the financial world is New York and Boston, and legal is in Washington. So you have to get on a plane and go to all these different places. Whereas in London, they’re all there. So what happens is people network with each other at meetings and conferences, and things happen. You get a lot of exciting convergences and ideas.
Source: skift.com