At the moment, I'm leading a transnational cluster collaboration project(they should definitely have a better name for it, please comment if you have one so that we can start a new wave!) where we focus on three major issuses where co-localization at trade fairs is one of them. Our project involves ICT clusters all over the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) and anyone and everyone are welcome to give us input in this field.
In our cluster a large number of companies travel to Barcelona each year in February to present themselves at the Mobile World Congress hoping to market their products and score new business deals to a great financial cost. Due to the step costs of participation with a stand (no critique intended to the organizers of this particular event) many Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) can't justify it in a ROI sense.
At the fair in Balrcelona many swedish SMEs join forces with the Swedish Trade Council and rent a place in their stand. A great initiative I think, and appreciated by most, the only problem being that businesses are forced to be co-localized in a hall of the trade fairs that perhaps wouldn't be their first choice. Wouldn't most companies instead prefer to be co localized with companies from the entire BSR instead so that they could have a stand in the appropriate congress hall?
In our project we aim to look at this problem with a fresh outlook hopefully. We'll arrange a round table meeting in Barcelona this year to see how we as public body actors can help SMEs to market themselves at trade fairs across Europe and the rest of the world on terms that suit them. All existing initiatives that we know of, like the good one mentioned before, will also be invited. If you want to join us, please contact me.
We have loads of ideas, on how to help the SMEs at the moment, but we need to know what they think themselves. At the moment, there's no end possibilities, perhaps we should raise a fund that all can request grants from covering the SMEs costs in part at these kind of trade fairs? What would be ideal?
//Philip Stankovski