Best of IMEX

Global business events community gathered together in Frankfurt on May 23-25 for IMEX, this huge event attracts closer to 4000 event planners and 3000 suppliers. This was the perfect place to seek out inspiration to the Current Issues and Future of Events related topics! Newly set up Events Lab at my workplace, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, is a co-creational experience center in which students, industry people and academics can join in discussion (and actions) to further enhance the possibilities of this wonderful field of business - events. This year, content of the trade show was all about living in the post-pandemic market. With all the disruption, people are seeking new ways to connect, need for face-to-face events is booming and creation of new kinds of experiences is bringing in new, quite exciting possibilities.

This event was also a magnificent place to make connections, I had the pleasure of engaging in discussions with so many interesting professionals all over the world. And quite a nice feeling was also to meet our Finland advocates who were promoting our wonderful country with Visit Finland, wonderful old colleagues there too :)

Some of the topics I marked down with my colleagues Kaija and Emilia from this trip:
* Inclusion in events, including neuro-inclusion
* New ways of connecting, internal meetings at event companies (or anywhere really) are driving culture
* Meetings & Events Trends for 2023 by Amex (download your copy here >>)
* Event Data, new platforms to gather insight and to analyze it
* Event wellbeing, how to incorporate wellbeing into events (IMEX had special wellbeing program to participants)
* Yes… Digitalization… ChatGPT, Metaverse etc. absolutely an interesting angle to our work
* Innovation and Co-creation, The Google Experience Institute (Xi) CoLabs

We do hope to make it to IMEX Las Vegas soon as well!