Conferences, head count and content

There have been a number of posts on theintegratedlab.com from time to time about conferences, so it was interesting to be alerted to some comments from Tim Bray and Simon Coles about ‘numbers of attendees’ reported by conference organisers. Now I don’t want to get into that specific issue, but in the background it does relate to the question about the purpose of a conference, and the business model behind it.

In my opinion, there are two different sets of requirements that emerge from a progressively maturing marketplace. Most of the meetings held by commercial conference organisers tend to be based on a business model that is aimed at serving vendors’ interests by targeting prospects. The technical programme focuses on case studies and broader, state of the industry/technology-type content. In the laboratory world, we’ve seen these conferences become well established in the LIMS and ELN domains. However, the International LIMS Conferences disappeared some years ago. It may be just a matter of time before a similar fate awaits the ELN conferences.

Over time, and as more delegates progress from being prospects to becoming users, the requirements change. In time, a ‘user’ community emerges whose interests are directed not so much towards the purchasing process, but more towards business and technology trends. As a consequence the requirement for the content of a conference has a different focus; you could say the emphasis shifts from the past (this is how we did it, or this is how to do it), to the future (what’s coming next, what will it mean, and how will we cope).

This changing interest requires a different model with less emphasis on sales and marketing, and more on emerging or evolving business and technology strategies and trends. To a limited extent, this can be, and is, addressed through the online community. Blogs and discussion groups can deal with this up to a point, despite the restrictions of sharing opinion on-line when you are an employee. But there’s a good number of people who believe that face-to-face meetings are an ideal compliment to on-line communication, and this perhaps explains why there is a sense of frustration that this need is not being met very well at the moment. The challenge for the commercial conference organisers is whether they can evolve a successful business model to address this changing need. In the early part of the life cycle of the big LIMS and ELN conferences, delegates had more questions than answers. When there are more answers than questions, its time to move on.