MICE venues embrace AI, XR & data to enhance guest experiences. A co-design program helps Flemish venues innovate & stay competitive.
The Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) sector is facing a period of complex change. While digital transformation has been a key focus for the past decade, today’s business pressures are more varied. Venues need to stay ahead of consumer trends, leverage data and create digitally enriched experiences to remain competitive and enhance the overall guest experience. Alongside this, the incorporation of emerging technologies, such as extended reality (XR) and generative AI now have a greater impact on fundamental business operations.
With advanced digitalisation becoming even more of a priority for MICE venues, combined with the growing importance of sustainability and connectivity, we were selected by Visit Flanders to run a five-stage co-design process to support leading heritage venues. Aiming to balance innovation with the budgetary and resource constraints associated with purchasing licenses and rolling out new technology and the extensive training required for operating new systems, the Digital Venue Transformation Programme provided an environment for active ideation on how technology and innovation can add value and justifying the rationale for potential investment.
As a human-centred approach to problem-solving that focuses on understanding diverse needs and perspectives, the programme encouraged collaboration, exploration and experimentation. By embedding design thinking into their decision-making process, the participating venues achieved the following:
Starting by mapping technological developments and trends, we built up awareness of different emerging technologies and explored their potential applications in event management. CRM technology was seen as the priority area for venues to enhance their internal workflows. Meanwhile, generative AI, VR and AR experiences and intelligent sensors were respectively observed as areas with significant potential for boosting efficiency and productivity, enabling immersive displays of venues for clients and tracking venue capacity. Overall, most technologies were positively received, with the only exception being biometrics due to the potential for inadvertently creating poor visitor experiences, while digital twins were a relatively unexplored technology.
Identifying common challenges faced by the venues enabled a clear prioritisation of objectives and the delineation of three distinct problem statements that acted as the reference point for the entire process, focusing on solving the following barriers:
Building upon the venues' internal perspectives, we delved into stakeholder needs to build empathy and create impactful visions for what future success looks like. To achieve this, the participants were supported to map out the influence and interest of their stakeholders to identify the different degrees of engagement required. A diverse mix of key stakeholders emerged; from B2B and B2C audiences—reflecting the mix of participating venues, politicians, event organisers, suppliers, guest speakers, content creators and even internal teams, with the venues identifying their needs and struggles to find common objectives and potential areas of misalignment. This ultimately led to defining scenarios of how each stakeholder group could be better supported, creating a basis for reflection on how different digital tools might help achieve the desired outcomes.
An intensive two-day technical site visit to leading MICE venues in London brought new perspectives on technological innovation through an international exchange of best practices on:
Seeing technology in practice and learning how world-renowned venues approach digitalisation resulted in a series of key takeaways on the advantages and opportunities brought by investing in technological advancement. Strong data establishes the potential for benchmarking performance while creating a centralised platform for managing bookings, workflows and reporting streamlines operational processes. To achieve this, the successful integration of technology is reliant on continuous improvements to processes that are designed to benefit the user and the potential for digital upgrades needs to consider medium and long-term objectives. Even outdated systems can drive success when all functionalities are used to their fullest. As such, having an integrated platform that can be relied upon for all facets of venue management brings better results than disparate systems that become a costly obstacle.
While fully embracing digital transformation is often achieved through purpose-built venues, technology can be successfully integrated into an older building. Investing in open standards to inform improvements ensures future-proofing, with customised software enabling quick adaptation to different event requirements. Identifying low-friction entry points is key to catering for diverse user needs and establishing a richer experience. Prioritising a digital-first approach also enables additional upselling opportunities when supported by in-house creative teams that ensure technical reliability and provide creative control and responsiveness to client needs.
Taking inspiration from the site visit and having established clear goals and considered the objectives of both venue managers and external stakeholders, hundreds of ideas were developed over three rounds of ideation. Starting with open ideation, participants shared their initial ideas, before delving into absurd ideation based on respecting budgetary, time and resource constraints. Finally, a technology-oriented focus enabled the venues to explore the potential of specific technologies. Ideas were then clustered and categorised based on achievability and expected impact. Following a vote on which ideas to move forward with, deeper analysis shaped the business proposition and highlighted both client and organisational value based on four factors to enable a comparison of the two strongest ideas:
During the final step, participants summarised their ideas into an elevator pitch to ensure they were easy to communicate to stakeholders. This process also involved identifying the sponsored users and the incentives needed to encourage them to provide feedback. Prototypes were then developed through wireframes and storyboarding, with design improvements made after participants exchanged feedback on each other's ideas. Potential risks were identified alongside other considerations needing to be explored during testing, enabling the creation of detailed project plans with clear milestones and reflection points.
Upon conclusion of the programme, participants pitched their three unique ideas to digitally transform MICE venue operations and improve attendee experiences:
These innovative solutions are poised to redefine the management of Flemish venues. This is the end of a sprint, but the start of a transformation.
The Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions (MICE) sector is facing a period of complex change. While digital transformation has been a key focus for the past decade, today’s business pressures are more varied. Venues need to stay ahead of consumer trends, leverage data and create digitally enriched experiences to remain competitive and enhance the overall guest experience. Alongside this, the incorporation of emerging technologies, such as extended reality (XR) and generative AI now have a greater impact on fundamental business operations.
With advanced digitalisation becoming even more of a priority for MICE venues, combined with the growing importance of sustainability and connectivity, we were selected by Visit Flanders to run a five-stage co-design process to support leading heritage venues. Aiming to balance innovation with the budgetary and resource constraints associated with purchasing licenses and rolling out new technology and the extensive training required for operating new systems, the Digital Venue Transformation Programme provided an environment for active ideation on how technology and innovation can add value and justifying the rationale for potential investment.
As a human-centred approach to problem-solving that focuses on understanding diverse needs and perspectives, the programme encouraged collaboration, exploration and experimentation. By embedding design thinking into their decision-making process, the participating venues achieved the following:
Starting by mapping technological developments and trends, we built up awareness of different emerging technologies and explored their potential applications in event management. CRM technology was seen as the priority area for venues to enhance their internal workflows. Meanwhile, generative AI, VR and AR experiences and intelligent sensors were respectively observed as areas with significant potential for boosting efficiency and productivity, enabling immersive displays of venues for clients and tracking venue capacity. Overall, most technologies were positively received, with the only exception being biometrics due to the potential for inadvertently creating poor visitor experiences, while digital twins were a relatively unexplored technology.
Identifying common challenges faced by the venues enabled a clear prioritisation of objectives and the delineation of three distinct problem statements that acted as the reference point for the entire process, focusing on solving the following barriers:
Building upon the venues' internal perspectives, we delved into stakeholder needs to build empathy and create impactful visions for what future success looks like. To achieve this, the participants were supported to map out the influence and interest of their stakeholders to identify the different degrees of engagement required. A diverse mix of key stakeholders emerged; from B2B and B2C audiences—reflecting the mix of participating venues, politicians, event organisers, suppliers, guest speakers, content creators and even internal teams, with the venues identifying their needs and struggles to find common objectives and potential areas of misalignment. This ultimately led to defining scenarios of how each stakeholder group could be better supported, creating a basis for reflection on how different digital tools might help achieve the desired outcomes.
An intensive two-day technical site visit to leading MICE venues in London brought new perspectives on technological innovation through an international exchange of best practices on:
Seeing technology in practice and learning how world-renowned venues approach digitalisation resulted in a series of key takeaways on the advantages and opportunities brought by investing in technological advancement. Strong data establishes the potential for benchmarking performance while creating a centralised platform for managing bookings, workflows and reporting streamlines operational processes. To achieve this, the successful integration of technology is reliant on continuous improvements to processes that are designed to benefit the user and the potential for digital upgrades needs to consider medium and long-term objectives. Even outdated systems can drive success when all functionalities are used to their fullest. As such, having an integrated platform that can be relied upon for all facets of venue management brings better results than disparate systems that become a costly obstacle.
While fully embracing digital transformation is often achieved through purpose-built venues, technology can be successfully integrated into an older building. Investing in open standards to inform improvements ensures future-proofing, with customised software enabling quick adaptation to different event requirements. Identifying low-friction entry points is key to catering for diverse user needs and establishing a richer experience. Prioritising a digital-first approach also enables additional upselling opportunities when supported by in-house creative teams that ensure technical reliability and provide creative control and responsiveness to client needs.
Taking inspiration from the site visit and having established clear goals and considered the objectives of both venue managers and external stakeholders, hundreds of ideas were developed over three rounds of ideation. Starting with open ideation, participants shared their initial ideas, before delving into absurd ideation based on respecting budgetary, time and resource constraints. Finally, a technology-oriented focus enabled the venues to explore the potential of specific technologies. Ideas were then clustered and categorised based on achievability and expected impact. Following a vote on which ideas to move forward with, deeper analysis shaped the business proposition and highlighted both client and organisational value based on four factors to enable a comparison of the two strongest ideas:
During the final step, participants summarised their ideas into an elevator pitch to ensure they were easy to communicate to stakeholders. This process also involved identifying the sponsored users and the incentives needed to encourage them to provide feedback. Prototypes were then developed through wireframes and storyboarding, with design improvements made after participants exchanged feedback on each other's ideas. Potential risks were identified alongside other considerations needing to be explored during testing, enabling the creation of detailed project plans with clear milestones and reflection points.
Upon conclusion of the programme, participants pitched their three unique ideas to digitally transform MICE venue operations and improve attendee experiences:
These innovative solutions are poised to redefine the management of Flemish venues. This is the end of a sprint, but the start of a transformation.
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