Innovation is a word often used to describe newness and has been an events industry buzzword for some time. The unabated challenge of delivering innovation in the events industry year-on-year causes headaches for event organisers both up and down the UK and further afield. Providing something different is seen as a key ingredient to keeping events fresh. New content can help ‘wow’ visitors and in turn provide exhibitors with the high quality audience they desire.

But is it possible to do this every year? There is no straight yes or no answer to that question. Each industry is unique; it would be unwise to compare furniture shows to digital media shows or even consumer show and trade shows and after all, we do have a benchmark for each!

While events provide a similar ‘meeting place’ for their industry, the industries themselves are so drastically different in their new product development and speed of change. The speed of innovation is only as fast as the industry it serves. This is something that really shone through in some findings we delivered to a client recently.

The one constant in all this is the ability to collect industry data – to fish for trends, to delve closer into the mind of the audiences and create a picture of what they believe the industry will look like in 2, 5 or even 10 years’ time. What does your industry see as innovative? In an age of the internet, can live shows still deliver ‘new’ products, or new things that people haven’t seen before?

As I said, here at Zing we have worked recently with some of our clients to help discover the ‘shape of what is to come.’ It is amazing how open customers will be to an independent third party, who have nothing but the best interests of the event and its organisers at heart. Our findings were conclusive in that show visitors agreed that the innovation at an event is only as good as the exhibitors on the show floor – and they need to be able to find it! Organisers are simply providing a platform for this to innovation to be showcased.

Real qualitative research can gather verbatim quotes from stakeholders. Grouping these together can provide compelling analysis and another viewpoint from which to see the challenges ahead.

We can’t help create the innovation, but we can help you to be at the forefront of data collection within your industry and give you the knowledge and insight to be able to preempt industry changes, predict innovation and set you off in the right direction towards finding it.

Posted by Jonathan