January 2024 was time for reflection or a post-mortem. The CES event ended with stories to share, evaluate, and learn about experiences. A trip to CES ends several weeks after the event closes the door. During the time that the CES event was in our minds, a lot of things occurred.
Taking a trip to a huge event requires the involvement of people in the organization from different points of view. Each person provides ideas and suggestions on how to make the best experience for the event.
Events like CES help learn what is new in the market and the trends people watch. It provides a connection with suppliers, collaborators, and customers.
What is the big challenge to have a successful journey in CES? You, as an entrepreneur, dream of being part of the action. You want to be noticeable as an exhibitor. You want to meet with your potential customers. You want to find new suppliers with the state of the art innovation to integrate into your products and solutions. You want to learn about your competitors. You want to be hidden from your competitors.
You want to prepare a whole strategy for the year to launch your new product or service to show up for the first time at an event like CES. How can you learn all the secrets needed to make your journey successful? Conversely, you need more resources and budget to accomplish all your goals. You look around your environment to find other startups with the same goal. You ask people that had been in such a situation in the past. When you start to find them, you feel relieved that you are not alone. The first step is managing the project with people who share the same goals, are open to adding resources to build synergy, and bring experts to help you build your plans.
You start looking on social media for information about previous endeavors, and you find a post from Michael Wozniak sharing his experience from his last trip to CES 2024, managing another highly productive Canadian B2B program at CES for Canada's Trade Commissioner Service office in Silicon Valley. An activity that Michael has done for several years. His knowledge about the event and the contacts developed after several years are precious to those participating in his activities.
While I was learning about his success, the same social media information allowed me to find other people with knowledge about the innovation ecosystem in Canada, something that you can map how it is the ecosystem in your own country, like connecting with blogs like https://betakit.com/that has a description of how one of the companies s got venture capital investment.
To develop a plan, it is helpful to know the country's rules and working scheme by listening to interviews like the one: Does Canada have an innovation strategy? Having an understanding of the mindset of how innovation works in your country, in the context of planning your journey to the best events in the world, will help you to align the group of companies participating with you as well to have a common ground with the people involved in your trip.
This is a simple example of how to travel to innovation to get the best results after your trip. Thanks to everyone involved in this endeavor for sharing their experience, knowledge, and results.