GCB’s ‘Future Meeting Space’ Funded by PCMA Education Foundation
August 14, 2017The GCB (German Convention Bureau) has announced that the Education Foundation of the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) is funding the second phase of the “Future Meeting Space” (FMS) research project, a cooperation between the GCB, the European Association of Event Centres (EVVC) and the Institute for Industrial Engineering of the Fraunhofer Association (IAO)— Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization.
The innovative FMS effort was begun over two years ago to help create a vision for how people will meet in the future, and to in turn deliver practical, hands-on tools for meeting planners and suppliers to help them get ahead of the curve of what’s to come.
Phase one began in December 2015 with an online “Innovation Catalogue” which offered inspiration and ideas on new and future technologies based on best practices around the meetings industry and beyond. Six “Future Meeting Scenarios” then came out of the FMS project last summer delivering forward-looking meeting set-ups. Finally, in fall of 2016 the “Future Meeting Room” was unveiled, a practical example intended to help anticipate the future needs and requirements of meeting participants. Click here for phase one results.
The second phase of the project, initiated this past spring, is now focusing on attendee engagement — investigating how different elements of meeting methodology and technology affect success factors of meetings including user acceptance, knowledge sharing, learning progress and experience value for different types of participants. This phase will leverage and extend the findings from phase one but also, by end of August 2018, deliver a set of additional and actionable recommendations based on the new participant-centric focus.
“The Future Meeting Space project is critical to helping organizations better engage their event participants and PCMA — and their shared dedication to helping the business events industry move forward, — is a perfect addition to our innovation alliance team,” says GCB Managing Director Matthias Schultze.
Meredith Rollins, executive director of the PCMA Education Foundation, adds: “We’re glad to be partnering with the German Convention Bureau’s innovation alliance to define how participants will engage with future meeting design. Education is key to success for our industry and this research projects tackles an issue that will shape our industry today and for the future.”