If there’s one industry that technology is disrupting, it’s the meetings and exhibitions sector. That thought was hammered home to me during the four days I spent at the ICCA conference in Shanghai. 

Pictured: ICCA’s CEO Martin Sirk with his Chinese hosts

This is one of the largest global gatherings of folks who are involved in holding meetings and exhibitions – more than 900 registered – so you get destination marketing organisations (DMOs), trade show organisers. professional congress organisers (PCOs), destination management companies (DMCs), convention bureaus, venues, hotels, airlines, associations, corporates. In Asia, the acronym is MICE and trust me, this industry is full of its own acronyms to wade through.

It’s a huge industry – larger than leisure travel – and every destination, from Singapore to Shanghai, wants a slice of it. For instance, just among ICCA, the average total expenditure of all meetings included in the ICCA Association Database was US$13,747,787,985 in 2011.

Hence governments build multi-million dollar facilities to woo events and an event like ICCA is put out for bidding and destinations compete to hold it – similar to the Olympics model. This year, Shanghai won it and next year, it will be held in Antalya, Turkey. (Below: Team Turkey shows up in force to welcome delegates to next year’s event)

In the US, there’s an association called PCMA (Professional Convention Management Association) and their annual conference in Boston in January 2014 is expected to attract more than 4,000 delegates.

There are lots of studies to prove that a convention or exhibition delegate spends considerably more than a tourist – and they consume venues, food & beverage, audio visual, design, etc  – it’s a whole eco-system that feeds off it, and travel is only a part of it.

At the heart of meetings and exhibitions is communications, learning, networking and selling – and these disciplines have been completely transformed by technology.

Yet the industry remains pretty traditional, dominated by practices and processes inherited from Europe and the US, where the industry is much more established. Exhibitions are still structured in similar formats – booths, aisle space, scheduled appointments. And most conferences remain unchanged in their formats despite the world of communications being turned upside down by technology.

ICCA’s CEO Martin Sirk personally puts in a lot of thought into the content and formats and has, over the years, moved the conference from being all about parties – have to say, this ICCA lot does party hard and it’s all very family-like – to more about learning and I like the way he slices and dices the programme – and the number of first-timers at the Shanghai conference shows the association is managing to remain relevant to a new generation.

There are some companies who are trying to insert themselves into the way delegates communicate with each other on-site. ICCA used SpotMe, one of the most established conference networking tools. It allows you to view the agenda, send messages, set up meetings, vote and take part in polls, and alerts you to who’s in your vicinity. Unfortunately it only works if the wifi is stable and in Shanghai, the wifi was spotty at best. Its price range though keeps it out of reach of smaller events like WIT, for instance.

The most activity I’ve seen myself as an event organizer is in the registration process – lots of companies trying to crack that with smart technology – and social networking tools such as Bizzabo, a new start-up which came onto my radar while I was organizing WIT, but I didn’t get round to testing it.

During the entrepreneurs session which I moderated, a question came up as to why there were so few companies in the sector that had gone public despite the size of the industry.

Reggie Aggarwal, CEO and founder of Cvent, a cloud-based event management software company, which went public in August this year, raising US$135 million in its initial offering, gave these reasons – the industry had done a poor selling job to the market, it is made up of lots of small companies which haven’t managed to scale; and there was not enough of serious technology play coming into the industry as yet.

Cvent is planning to use the new capital to expand beyond the US – it now has two international offices in India and London – and it plans to invest heavily in mobile which its executive vice president of sales and marketing Chuck Ghoorah identified as an area undergoing a “tremendous pivot” being driven by event-goers.

Aggarwal believes the time is ripe for a bigger technology play given how smartphone adoption was sweeping the globe, and changing customer behaviour and a new generation of consumers entering the market.

The key is to understand the pain points in the industry.

Aggarwal was a corporate lawyer who found himself having to organize meetings for associations and realized there had to be a better way to manage events, hence he started Cvent to focus on event management software. He’s led Cvent from a two-person startup to a 1,400-person company with a $1.3 billion market capitalization, but of course not without its trials and tribulations as with any start-up.

During the session in Shanghai, in which he took part via video conference, he spoke of a time when he burned US$70 million in 18 months and found himself broke and having to live with his parents and off his credit card for a couple of years. He had to lay off staff but he persevered. “It takes passion and perseverance,” he said.

What makes this space even more exciting now is the fact that media companies are now looking at conferences as a way of creating new revenue streams, as this article states. The New York Times for instance had one conference in 2011 but is looking at 16 in 2013.

So can there be more technology success stories such as Cvent in the MICE space and make fat cats out of those who try and disrupt it? You bet.

Here are two examples: Sheldon Adelson of The Las Vegas Sands empire built his fortune after selling an exhibition he created in 1979 – COMDEX. Ray Bloom, whom I also interviewed during the panel, sold two shows he created to Reed Exhibitions and then went on to create another event, IMEX, which dominates Europe and is conquering the USA.

So it needn’t be all about technology, but a great idea that solves a pain point in this huge industry. It’s up to you.