brand driven innovation

For a good conference you need a good topic, a good line up of speakers, a good conference format, a good venue and a good audience. The creative company conference that was held on april 1st 2008 in het Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, organised by Rudolf van Wezel of Bis Publishers and Ravi Naidoo of the South African Design Indaba as part of the dutch Creative Challenge Call, was a pretty damn good conference. With some start-up problems. My evaluation is as follows (on a scale from 1 to 10)

topic: 8

Creative companies have the future. Its great to hear peolple talk about what creativity has brought them. And the topic is still enough of a mystery (how do you organize creativity, how do you convince the board of its added value, how do you get creativity on the workfloor, etc) to guarantee a day of lively discussion. I would have briefed the speakers in a more precise way though. The topic has to be broken down in precise questions if you want the speakers to get to a level where new insights are created.

line up: 7,5

Speakers on a conference have to (1) lead an interesting life or to have an interesting job. They also have to (2) be able to reflect on their lives or jobs, and to destill insights form this reflection that are worth sharing. Then ofcourse (3) they have to be able to communicate these insights in an inspiring way. Most speakers scored high on these three points, with Ivy Ross, Bill Moggridge, John Howkins, and Robert Brozin topping the list with absolutely inspiring and insightful speeches. A delight to experience. In the evening programme Paul Hughes and Walter Amerika were spot on with their observations and insights. Other speakers like Marcel Wanders (award for most tipsy presenter), Jeroen van Erp, Marc Matthieu, Stanley Hainsworth (award for most creative hairdo for least creative person) and Carlos Miele are all very good at what they do but their reflection on their work and ability to share key learnings with a large audience are insufficient to rock my boat. The special award for worst powerpoint slides go to Arkadi Kuhlmann. I think design/creativity conferences should have a powerpoint police that are entitled to undemocratically forbid these atrocities.

In general I thought there were too many speakers, quantity going at the expense of quality. And I think when you put people in a panel you need people with empathy, improvisation skills, the ability to listen to others, and the will to build a story together. Those people are just extremely rare. My respect goes to Paul Hughes, who succeeded in giving depth to the discussion despite of the chaos around him. Then you need some really good chairpeople leading the conversation. the likes of Pauw & Witteman. They may not be design savvy but I am very sure they would do a better job than what the evening audience was confronted with.

conference format: 6

This was not a very creative conference, in the sense that the format was completely traditional. If you take the purpose of a conference like this as a starting point (to be inspired, to meet people, to learn, to step out of your daily comfort zone, to take away something durable) I think we should be able to design a different conference format. With more interaction, more choice with regards to depth vs breadth, more on-line / off-line synergy, and more intense experiences. I’m not saying this will be easy, but no design job is. I for one am challenged to think of new ways to meet as a creative community.

Venue 10

What a beautiful building and what a location. Perfect. (I say this as a Rotterdammer ). T-mobile should do something about reception in the big room, but I can hardly blame the organisation for that.

Audience 9

I’ve met some really interesting and inspiring people from all kinds of backgrounds, and besides the usual suspects (to whom I am starting to belong so I heard) I saw a great many new faces and companies. I’ve heard the complaint that there were too many suits and not enough creatives but I consider that a compliment to the suits and a pointed finger at the creatives. Very many creatives hate to talk about/think about/discuss/reflect on their creativity. That’s their problem, not the conference’s. By the way: in this light I was amazed at hearing Jeroen van Erp say that it is easier for designers to think strategically than for strategists to think like a designer. What nonsense. Let’s please stop treating design like some kind of closed off fantasy land that only people with strange hairdo’s have the password to.

Another issue is that the entry fee of a conference like this may be high for a starting creative entrepreneur. I think there are possibilities to let these people pay with their creative talents (which they have in abundance) in stead of with money (which they -apparently- have not). The people who do have the money would benefit from this in that they get to meet/see/interact with more creativity in the conference.

This leads to an unweighted average of 8,1 which is high. I had a great day at what is to be the first issue in a potentially groundbreaking series of conferences of which we creative dutchmen can be genuinely proud. Congratulations to the organisation.

Bare with me: my next post will be in the form of mindbytes and will treat the actual content of the conference.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.