Skift Take
London Tech Week shows the impact that convention bureaus can have on developing live events that shift a city's destination brand image.
Europe’s top convention bureaus are positioning themselves more strategically as platforms for crowdsourcing and co-locating conferences in aligned industries.
London & Partners is doing this at the local level by aggressively clustering London Tech Week with as many other tech conference as possible. That gives smaller events a bigger stage and access to global marketing, and it drives greater worldwide exposure around London's booming tech industry year-over-year.
The inaugural London Tech Week in 2014 launched as somewhat of an experiment, developed initially as a collaboration between New York ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg and London’s mayor at the time, Boris Johnson. The two men saw an opportunity to leverage London’s burgeoning startup scene in Shoreditch’s Tech City district in East London as a catalyst for economic development for the entire capital.
Primarily, they wanted to ensure that the city remained competitive with the surging European startup communities in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
In June, London Tech Week 2016 hosted more than 45,000 attendees at 300-plus sessions in 207 venues. Target attendance is 100,000 attendees in the next three years.
The lead organizations behind the event are: London & Partners, the Department for International Trade, the Tech UK trade association, Tech City, the ExCel London convention center, and the Tech London Advocates group, consisting of more than 3,500 tech and knowledge industry professionals.
Promoted as “The First Festival of Health, Travel, Retail, Advertising, Fashion, Food, and Financial Tech,” the 5-day event has more than doubled in size in three years because it’s designed as an open-source event platform.
Meaning, London & Partners encourages any tech company to create their own events around the par
