The Secret to Innovation

Breasting Your Cards 101: The best idea is one that's worth adopting and developing yourself. The Olympics has resulted in a spiffy new conference centre that will be added to the mix in Vancouver's strategy to become a North American conference centre with all the lucrative tourist dollars that implies.   However, that strategy has always been hampered by such factors as cross-border travel issues, expense for attendees and the sheer inability of many to afford the time involved in travelling to a conference.  

Breasting Your Cards 101: The best idea is one that’s worth adopting and developing yourself.

The Olympics has resulted in a spiffy new conference centre that will be added to the mix in Vancouver’s strategy to become a North American conference centre with all the lucrative tourist dollars that implies.
 
However, that strategy has always been hampered by such factors as cross-border travel issues, expense for attendees and the sheer inability of many to afford the time involved in travelling to a conference.  

Now, a BC Entrepreneur is conducting a creative experiment that may turn that conference centre strategy on its head and innovate an entire industry.  

Andrea Lee, Victoria-based CEO of Thought Partners International, business and life coach, who operates a global Internet-based coaching operation, is re-engineering event management by staging a “hybrid conference” in Vancouver. It will combine the physical assembly of attendees with borrowed Internet techniques, such as webinars, to extend the conference to hundreds of others who can’t actually make it to the city.

Lee cut her teeth on coaching and event management as COO of Coachville, an international business coaching operation that amassed some 39,000 clients in a few short years. Since 2003, she has been an independent coach who primarily uses internet marketing to conduct her own business.

From experience, Lee knew that the primary appeal of a conference is the networking opportunities it provides to those who attend.  But she also knew that many others are just as interested in the information that is produced by the conference.

So she’s divided her Wealthy Thought Leader conference among those two distinct groups.

Lee expects about 90 people, many of them relatively local, to physically attend the conference that is being held March 18-20 in a hotel she chose because it is willing to try new creative and entrepreneurial methods.

However the conference will also be streamed live to the computers of subscribers around the world who don’t have the time or resources to travel to Vancouver but are still interested in the entrepreneurial coaching information that will be the main theme of the conference’s speakers. Because the live streaming will be available for up to eight days after the event, Lee expects the number of subscribers to be much higher than the number who physically attend.

She’s even made the decision easier by providing a decision-making matrix to potential attendees so they can decide what course they want to follow. And she’s simulating the  learning opportunities of a conference by creating a dedicated twitter stream that will create networking conversations in real time. As well, she’ll have a coach on standby who will monitor the streams for questions and provide answers.

Lee has also addressed another primary purpose of an internet marketing conference — the potential to convert attendees into paying clients. Generally, conference attendees are encouraged to sign up for further coaching, and many advisors warned Lee that she would miss out on this opportunity. So she rolled out the internet marketing technique of list-building to capture information about all those subscribers  through their twitter streams.

A good idea should be spread

Lee says she hatched her idea by attending the famous TED thought leadership conference which has as its mantra “ideas worth spreading” and attracts thousands of attendees annually.  

Since Vancouver is known as a thought-leadership city, she says, it seemed natural to advance TED’s concept and spread the new style of conference here.

At the same time, the hybrid conference is greener in that it creates less carbon emissions from travel, so it fits with Vancouver’s green image.

Best of all, she says, the conference’s internet stream will be filled with images of Vancouver’s beauty and unique culture, so will further encourage tourism.

And all of this will be far less costly than the billions spent on the Olympics or convention centres.