Filling The Gap Bringing The Consumer Oriented Approach To The Events App Market Through The Lean Startup Methodology

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Title: Filling the gap: bringing the consumer oriented

approach to the events app market through the Lean
Startup Methodology
Program: MSc - ISE 7 - Grenoble (2014 - 2016)
Academic Year: 2014-2015
Dissertation / Project / Internship Report: Final Management Project 2014-2015
Student Name: De Domenico Giovanni
School Tutor / Evaluator Name: Rase Philippe
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Summary: The project aims at finding better answers to events attendees needs. The mobile event
app market has been analysed with its the main actors. We explored their offerings through the Lean
Startup Methodology. Additionally, the design industry has been taken as reference to provide
concrete insights. Through the results we could give meaningful recommendations and suggest new
research paths.
Keywords: (cf. Thesaurus du Management):

ENTREPRENEURSHIP
EXPERIENCE MARKETING
EVENT COMMUNICATION
SERVICE ECONOMY
1
Filling the gap: bringing the consumer oriented approach
to the events app market through the Lean Startup
Methodology
Abstract
The research deepens the topics of event management and aims at
understanding why the mobile app event market did not find an industry
leader and a dominant design. Through an analysis of the academic concepts
related to the event environment we lay the theoretical foundations that
support us in the examination of the potentials that an event app could
leverage. The design industry has been taken as a reference point and we
have further analysed what the mobile event app market is currently offering
and what the design industry propose to who is willing to live an event in a
smart and seamless way. We have applied the Lean Startup Methodology in
order to understand what the target customer think about the current
situation and which could be the possible evolutions. Finally, we have
introduced our insights from both the theoretical and managerial point of
view opening the door to future research.
2
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. Key definition
III. Events management industry and Design context significance
a. Events management
i. Events management industry and mobile event app market
analysis
ii. Events organization motivations
iii. Events benefits
b. Technology adoption and mobile development
c. Design Industry, the potential target market
i. The industry
ii. The new environment
IV. Events management Literature review and Lean Startup
a. Events from academic point of view
i. Events evolution
ii. Nature of events
iii. Events Challenges and Opportunities
b. The Lean Startup Methodology Analysis
i. A Lean Startup Methodology Introduction
ii. Lean Startup Methodology’s Five principles
iii. The Lean Startup’s contributions
iv. Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop
V. Methodology analysis
a. The methodology
b. Interviews’ choices drivers
c. Qualitative research value
VI. Data collection process and major issues faced
a. Data gathering challenge and process
b. Interviews issues
VII. Data analysis
a. Existing apps providers’ analysis
b. Design Week’s apps analysis
c. Value creation and growth hypothesis
d. Interviews
VIII. Results from data analysis
a. Results from mobile event app landscape analysis
b. Findings from dedicated event design apps
c. Interviews Insights
IX. Relevant implications and findings
a. Contribution to the existing literature
b. Managerial implications
X. Limitation of the work
XI. Bibliography
XII. Appendices
3
I. Introduction
This research aims at turning the attention of the business and academic environment
to the events and mobile event apps. We have analysed these marketing and
communication tool and attempt to describe their potentialities. The origin of events is
lost in the down of time, human beings need their peers and we are not still able to
explain ourselves the reasons. Sharing and connecting with other human beings is a
fundamental part of our nature and this tendency can be productively exploited by
organizations interested in a more intense connection with their stakeholders. We have
explored the importance of events pointing out the event management industry
attractiveness and its evolution towards the Mobile Era. The literature review has
highlighted various lacks compared to the quantitative researches that we have been
found. Indeed, the business environment has already acknowledged the strategic
potential of the events, as we can see from the professionals’ opinions, and it is
embracing this marketing mix tool while the literature is delaying this
acknowledgement. We have identified a lack in the research field that concerns the
effect that event mobile apps can have on the event performances and on the business
organization ones. Additionally, we took as sample the design industry which appear to
be underdeveloped under this point of view. According to our opinion, the industry lack
we have identified depends on an inadequate approach to which can be the real
customers’ needs. After an analysis of the Lean Startup Methodology, we have explored
the available solutions which attendants can use to live an event in a smarter way,
taking also into account the solutions with which design events’ participants currently
deal with. The research we have pursued allowed us to approach the interviews with a
more conscious approach. We have been able to formulate the basic Lean Startup
hypothesises and test them through the target profiles’ opinions and feelings. Finally,
we suggested which can be the implications of our work and which could be the possible
future research.
II. Key definition

In this research we are going to use several time the world event which excludes the
virtual events which have been overlooked in this study. We refer to event describing
the traditional event categories such as tradeshows, fairs, conferences, seminars,
presentations, exhibitions or product launch and awards. We are going to talk about
participants and attendants which we have used as synonym, these words describe the
various type of people who come to an event for various reason. The term stakeholder
includes also the attendants but is more generic because has been used to identify all
the people, companies and organization that are connected somehow to the event and
have any kind of interest towards it: for example, in a business-to-consumers event the
stakeholders include not only the company’s customers but also the investors, suppliers
and employees. We have also discussed about event app providers that we identified as
Software-as-a-Service companies which provide a mobile application. This clarification
is needed because many companies were providing different apps so we could not
identify the app itself with the company. We have referred to mobile event apps
describing mobile smartphone applications conceived to support the event’s attendants
in living a better experience during the event duration.
III. Events management industry and Design context significance

a. Events management
4
i. Events management industry and mobile event app market analysis
People have always gathered throughout the Mankind history. Men look for their peers
because it belongs to the innate human characteristics. At the humankind roots, we can
witness gatherings as a form of self-defence: the human beings know that together they
are stronger than alone.
As time goes by, human beings began to gather to change things. If we look back to the
history, we see how gatherings frequently precede significant social, political and
religious changes. For this reason, the available evidence seems to suggest that
circumstances related to changes are likewise related to people who meet other people.
Yet, it is still true. Nowadays, when people want to change something they gather,
peacefully or not. Indeed, we acknowledge a shift in the value of gatherings: from self-
defence to the willingness to change something. Between those two extremities, there
are several shades of gatherings reasons which led us to the events how we know them
today. According to the Oxford dictionary 1 an event is “A planned public or social
occasion”, people gather not only to change things but also to exchange ideas, opinions,
point of views, knowledge, competencies, help. People gather and organize events to
make their voice stronger, state or claim their rights or their opinions. Moreover, people
create events to make money, show that something exist and make others aware of it.
Events turned in a business itself and belong to the business environment. Events
crossed any borders that can classify them, they are entirely transversal and this is
what make them so important. Events signed history: if we take a look to the
technological, sport and cultural ones we see how they have contributed to the human
evolution. In every civilization, gatherings, ceremonies and awards were considered as
important occasions where the community was coming together to celebrate its own
beliefs, identities and success. Human gathers because they are made to be connected
among each other: it is a way to grow as human being and to be enriched by the
contribution that other human beings can give us. The interaction is a moment that give
us a better perception of who we are and what we want to achieve. The moment in which
we confront with others, in a positive way, have contributed to shape human history
and culture and will continue to do that.
From a business perspective, more than $500B2 is spent per year on events worldwide.
Among the business-to-business marketers, events represent almost the 20% of their
budget 3 , in this context events own even a more important function because allow
companies to meet all the stakeholders and communicate with them.
Certainly, events value has changed several time during the years: the focus moved
from the traditional emphasis on operational excellence and logistics to a showcase
value where a company or any other entity can exploit the event sales and marketing
enablers power4.
From episodic planned public or social occasion, events became part of our life. Globally
there are 5 million meetings and events annually which gather 512 million attendees5
1
Oxford Dictionaries, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/event, 28/07/2016.
2
“A Survey of Meeting and Event Planning Professionals and Hotel Operators”, Frost & Sullivan, 2013, p. 3
3
“B2B Marketing Budgets Set to Rise 6% in 2014: Forrester”, AdAge, 2014 http://adage.com/article/btob/b2b-marketing-budgets-
set-rise-6-2014-forrester/291207/
4
“The Definitive Guide to Event Marketing”, Marketo, Inc 2012, p. 75
5
“Financial Analysis and Market Sizing of the Global Event Management Software Market”, Frost & Sullivan, 2013, p. 7
5
that makes a total global addressable market size of 28 billion 6. According to CMO
Council Research, 9 out of 10 marketers assert events own importance and value for
their organization, 31% consider them essential for their business7. In fact, in a world
where everything is shifting to digital and virtual, marketers claim that “live face-to-
face engagements that occur during events and exhibitions are core to their business
growth and development strategies”8.
Human interactions still play a fundamental role and represent significant

opportunities to reach the target in one of the most natural and genuine way. On these
grounds, we can argue that events belong to those components of the marketing mix
able to guarantee strategical insights, analytics and a stronger engagement with the
most valuable prospects customers: what we would define as an additional value. In-
person events are seen as the most effective marketing tactic by 72% of business-to-
business marketers9 confirming how this marketing mix component gives a noteworthy
contribution in that context.
ii. Events organization motivations

Events have evolved through time along with the increased technological pace. Today,
we have also webinars, virtual events and live streaming events. We can define them as
digitalized and virtual version of traditional events such conferences and fairs except
virtual events, which are brand new events that use new technologies such Augmented
Reality and multi-user virtual environment. The traditional events include tradeshows,
which are gatherings dedicated to a particular industry or to professionals of a precise
market, conferences that companies or associations usually organize for specific
information deliveries reasons, seminars, which we can defined as learning events
usually made for knowledge sharing purposes including also roadshows and field
events10. Beyond the above mentioned ones, product launches, philanthropic events and
award ceremonies11 are also important elements of the events categories more specific
and often self-celebratory. Fairs, tradeshows and conferences are among the most
common kind of events: they allow entire industry to meet and exchange ideas and
knowledge or lay the foundations for new trend and research fields: some of them made
the history such as the International Expositions where all the new technology
developments are presented every sixteen years. Further evidence supporting event
effectiveness in the business-to-business context may lie in the findings of a Forrester
research, which point, one of the most common category, the tradeshow, as the second
most effective business-to-business marketing tactic 12 . Indeed, in B2B ecosystems
reaching the customers in new and engaging way is a task even more challenging.
Four main reasons lead to the event organization decision according to Marketo experts,
a company which provides automated marketing softwares. In the survey the conducted
6
“Financial Analysis and Market Sizing of the Global Event Management Software Market”, Frost & Sullivan, 2013, p. 8
7
“Customer Attainment From Event Engagement”, CMO Council, 2013, p. 13
8
“Customer Attainment From Event Engagement”, CMO Council, 2013, p. 3
9
http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/in-person-events-rated-most-effective-for-b2b-content-marketers-
24276/, Marketing Charts, 2012
10
“The Definitive Guide to Event Marketing”, Marketo, Inc. 2012, p. 12
11
Crowther, P. (2011),"Marketing event outcomes: from tactical to strategic", International Journal of Event
and Festival Management, Vol. 2 Iss 1 pp. 77
12
Forrester, https://www.act-on.com/blog/2014/01/new-forrester-benchmark-top-marketers-optimize-lead-gen-
part-1/, July, 2016
6
(Figure 1), lead generation (83%) has been ranked as top reason. The second and third
most popular reasons are tied: customer engagement (72%) and building brand
awareness (72%). The last chosen reason has been product education and training
(57%)13. Events foster the lead generation, 83% of respondents ranked it as first reason
that motivated them to organize an event. Being physically close to your target enables
various opportunities, even more if the company itself organized the events and selected
carefully and properly the guests. In fact, an organization has to select meticulously its
attendance in order to increase the likelihood to interact with prospects who have
already gathered information about the organization and are interested in knowing
more about it. The event can turn to be a memorable moment which nurture solid and
structured connections with prospects or stakeholders. By creating an informal
atmosphere where the prospect does not perceive to be in the middle of a telesales
session, the organization can lay the foundations of positive and long-lasting
relationships.
Figure 1
Respondents ranked with equal merit customer engagement and branding and
awareness reasons. Events offer exclusive interaction opportunities with the
attendants. This kind of interaction is the one that extremely influence loyalty, which
is one of the greatest value for organization. There is overwhelming evidence
corroborating the notion that retain existing customers is greatly more profitable than
consuming resources to acquire new ones 14 . Indeed, those loyal customers not only
spend more than the new ones (up to 67% more15) and are cheaper to keep loyal16 17 but
they also can turn in the first and most credible advertising tool for an organization.
The foregoing discussion implies that loyalty is actually one of the most efficient tool to
acquire new customers since the word of mouth that comes from the retained ones can
spread and influence the prospects that the organization aim at acquiring. Indeed, in a
world where “the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to
13
“The Definitive Guide to Event Marketing”, Marketo, Inc. 2012, p. 15
14
Gallo, A. “The Value of Keeping the Right Customers”, Harvard Business Review, 2014
15
Loechner, J. “Existing Customers Spend 2/3 More, Cost 10 Times Less”, Center for Media Research, 2014
16
Moth, D. “Almost a quarter of businesses don't carry out any relationship marketing: report”, Econsultancy, 2013
17
Sharma, A.“Online Retailers Should Care More About the Post-Purchase Experience”, Harvard Business Review,
2016
7
8 seconds today […] puts us on a par with the goldfish, whose attention span is
estimated at 9 seconds”18 consumers and in general all the stakeholders can be more
sensitive to peer recommendations and suggestions than external advertisement
sources like emails, banners and TV or web’s ads. The same attention issue faced by the
organization while drawing stakeholders and prospect attention is overcome at event
premises: planners have the attendees’ full attention and voluntary participation
meaning that they can communicate differently and attempt to exploit upselling
opportunities. If it is properly planned, the experience lived by the customers and
stakeholders in general can fuel positive and viral word-of-mouth and FOMO (i.e. Fear
of missing out) a social angst that brands are always more often stimulating within their
audience in order to increase the engagement.
Branding and awareness reasons have been always a marketing driver. Through events,
organization can establish and build their brand: events are perfectly suitable for
marketers who seek for idea sharing moments and opportunity to customize and
prearrange the desired interaction with a selected audience. During an event, planners
do their best to communicate the organization value propositions and values: it can turn
to be an opportunity to reveal hidden or brand new organizations’ aspects. Moreover,
current research appears to validate the view that live events are more effective than a
traditional advertising form as TV ones: according to the 87%19 (see Figure 2) of the
1600 interviewed by the Event Marketing Institute stated that live events support them
better in understanding product compared to TV advertisement.
Figure 2
Lastly, educational purposes are in fourth place among the reasons that led to
organizing an event. Learning is one of the toughest strengths that drive attendees’
presence. People are eager to learn and improve as professionals and when they
acknowledge someone’s competencies are willing to take part in something that can
enrich them, leaving them something. Of course, it puts the events content in the central
spot: the information quality, availability and clarity are, probably, among the main
event success indicators. The educational events give incredible connection building
opportunities and can contribute to set a brand, an expert or an organization as leader
within its field.
iii. Event benefits
18
Weinreich H., Obendorf H., Herder E., and Mayer, M.: “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” in
the ACM Transactions on the Web, vol. 2, no. 1 (February 2008), article #5
19
“Event Track 2015”, Event Marketing Institute, 2015, pp. 11
8
As we can see from Figure 3, events positively influence brand perception. Indeed, the
attendees declared they had a more positive opinion regarding the company after the
event 74%20 compared to the past.
Figure 3
Events affect positively also the purchase. In fact, 65% 21 of consumers purchase a
product or a service at the event premises because organizations give the opportunity
to try the product or service (when possible), allow the customers to check and browse
the product and provide attendees with discounts or special deal, which increase the
purchase likelihood22 (Figure 4).
Figure 4
Assuming attendees where already interested in the promoted product or service, 98%23
of them claimed to be more inclined to purchase after the participation, driven by the
possibility to get free samples and special discounts, acquire information about the
5product as well as the preference for a determined brand and the particular interest
for an event24. The influence on purchasing activities does not end with the purchase
on-site. Indeed, 87%25 of the “buyer attendees” bought again the product or service after
the event afterwards. A trend that experienced a strong peak if compared with the
previous years when the same percentage was much lower as showed in the Figure 5.
Additionally, events can affect customer retention creating a bond which starts with the
first purchase and according to the respondents become a long-term one: as a matter of
fact, 70% 26 of attendees and participants after the first on-site become regular
customers.
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
9
Figure 5
Besides the above mentioned benefits, technology can further boost the event value for
an organization: it can improve attendance by 20%27 and allow cost saving for 20-30%28
while increasing the engagement. Events are classified as second most important lead
channel29 and impact ROI since 63% of brands which organized events saw a “2 to 1
return or higher”30 while the ones that experienced a 5 to 1 return increased twofold31.
Through events, any entity has the power to create a lasting and powerful positive
impression towards its stakeholders. Thus, people can experience and interact with a
company, a product or a service while participating in an event securing the loyalty of
the existing stakeholders while acquiring new prospect ones.
b. Technology adoption and mobile development

In 2013, according to Frost and Sullivan32 few planners were reporting the usage of a
technology solution for planning purposes, and two thirds (68%) had never licensed
event management software. Planners were complaining about the execution time that
demanded them five days or longer to be implemented, this was costing them $22 billion
each year. In spite of this, planners and organizers which employed a technology
solution were reporting measurable and significant benefits: attendance rose by 20% as
well productivity by 27%. Additionally, cost savings were about 15% in booking costs
reductions and the responsiveness to their Request for Presence grew by 22%.
The situation changes considerably in 2014, giving us an understanding more consistent

with the contemporary situation. According to a research made by Meeting
Professionals International in collaboration with DoubleDatch, a mobile event
applications provider, “Mobile application are quickly becoming an integral component
of the event professional’s toolbox”. In fact, 63% of meeting professionals are currently
using mobile application to enhance their events while 60% of the professionals who are
not using them are planning to do it within one year 33 . This trend continued to be
recorded, in fact mobile phone usage for events is still on the rise with 86% of event
planners expected to have an app at their event in 201634.
Indeed, during 2016, 88% of planners expect their attendees to consider mobile event
apps as critical to their event experience. Mobile events apps are satisfying organizers
needs since 94% of them will increase or maintain their app budget spending level.
27
Ludwig, B. “Event Marketing Best Practices that Drive ROI”, Cvent, 2014, pp 11
28
29
30
31
32
“A Survey of Meeting and Event Planning Professionals and Hotel Operators”, Frost & Sullivan, 2013, pp 3
33
“The State of Events App”, Meeting Professional International and DoubelDatch, 2014, pp 9
34
“The Momentum of Mobile Event Apps”, The Event Marketing Institute and Cvent, 2016, pp 3 - 6
https://www.crowdcompass.com/newsroom/planners-engagement-increases-with-mobile-event-apps.shtml
10
Those who are going to increase it, will grow the budget by 21%35. Moreover, attendees
are satisfied as well since 44% of them use mobile events app currently and organizers
expect this trend to rise up to 56% within the end of 2016. Concerning event
professionals, those we are not currently using an event app are going to do that in the
next 6-12 months. Within 2015, 85% of meeting professionals will use an event app36.
Currently, 63% of event planners use mobile app to organize and handle the event
management (Figure 6), the primary purposes appear to be the convenience offered to
the attendants, the support they can take advantage of in easing the access to the
information and accelerating its distribution concerning event schedule building and
event sessions details37.
Figure 6
The focus is going to be around the engagement that the mobile apps can achieve facing,
for example, the live audience response through surveys and polls. The integration with
the event strategy is going to be stronger and stronger, involving the event app before,
during and after the event creation and management process. Data-generation,
attendee retention, lead retrieval and event performance analysis will be the possible
fields for the new upcoming expected features. Selecting the most suitable technological
solution for an event is becoming an activity affected by the most powerful decision
makers within the company. Mobile applications are not only a more convenient
solution compared to the old paper guide but they also perfectly integrate as a natural
component of the overall event strategy and experience. The importance of these apps
lay in their ability to influence key dimension such as stakeholder retention, revenue
outcomes and data collection. Concerning the professionals who currently offer or have
developed a mobile app for a meeting or event in the past, we can observe a trend
majorly among association meeting professionals followed by corporate meeting
professional and meeting management professional. Government meeting professionals
recorded the lowest percentage among the interviewed. As said before, the 60% of
professionals are planning to use event app within 12 months: 26% in one year, 20%
between 6 and 12 months and 14% within 6 months38 (Figure 7).
35
“The Momentum of Mobile Event Apps”, The Event Marketing Institute and Cvent, 2016, pp 3
https://www.crowdcompass.com/newsroom/planners-engagement-increases-with-mobile-event-apps.shtml
36
37
38
11
Figure 7
If we have to examine why mobile app are so strategical for event planning, we can
evaluate three main causes: social community engagement power, content
centralization and analytical and measurements enabler. Indeed, event apps are mainly
developed for a double reason: provide convenience to the attendees and create a
trustable source of data in order to improve the meetings and events39. The second major
reason regards the engagement. The applications are really valuable when it comes to
encourage optimal attendee engagement.
The critics often said event mobile apps are just replacing the printed schedules, guides
and brochure usually handed out at the meetings. Through the apps, organizers not
only can provide that information but they can also interact whenever they want with
all the involved stakeholders. The apps turn to be “a convenient hub for all event-critical
information”. Event planners can stream the most updated event details. Changes,
delays and cancellations can be communicated without printing again the hard copy.
The app can become a resource tool as well: slide decks, PDFs, videos, podcasts and
eBooks are usually sent before, during and after the event. Through the app, the
organizers can plan all event content from beginning to end with a powerful
remarketing tool available.
Mobile applications contribute to create a community environment for attendees besides

engaging them with meaningful content and through each other. A platform to
communicate among them allows planners to create an intense bond between the
attendees and the event. Status updates and private messaging are just two of the
features that enrich the possibility that the new technology pace gave to event
organizers. The results of the new engagement level reached are a greater brand loyalty
and attendees’ retention. The constant activity happening on event applications gives
new power to organizers who can proactively identify arising problems addressing them
with the most suitable solutions. Planners can approach the event management highly
more confident about the proactive contribution they can bring thus ensuring attendees’
satisfaction. Event apps empower organizer from the communication point of view too.
They are not only able to address promptly any arising problem but also ease the
communication among attendees, exhibitors and speakers characterizing the event with
a more collaborative and participatory shape.
39
12
If it’s true that planners use event mobile applications to collect data and improve future
events, likewise it’s true that they often linger on app downloads number, active users,
activities per user to determine whether the application or the event has been
successful. Unfortunately, those numbers can give a basic understanding of the app
success or event’s one. By focusing on those numbers, organizers barely affect the event
experience. Comprehend and react to the event performance: this must be the goals
pursued by the planners. To do that, they need engaging and interacting tools such as
in-app polling and survey features. Those features enable a deeper data understanding.
Organizers need to focus on the data that really can make the difference rather than
easily digitalize badges, event guides and attendees record, they can rethink the whole
experience identifying what is shifting the balance during the event.
c. Design Industry, the potential target market
i. The industry
We are now focusing on the Design Industry, where we observed a gap between what
events app are proposing and what attendees are looking for. We aim at answering why
we narrowed the focus on this field. First it has been a choice driven by the willingness
to provide a solution for an environment which represents an excellence in my country.
Design is synonym of Italy as much as fashion and Food & wine. Besides patriotic
reasons, the Italian design industry is the worldwide leader with 30% of the market
share40. Additionally, the design context is highly demanding so the findings can be
easily transposed in other fields.
The world design market has a total value of €29 billion41, its CAGR is around 2 – 3%42
and the market is expected to triple its dimension within ten years. The Italian export
rose by 16%43 accounting for 64% of the total production. The main countries are United
States and China followed by Russia and United Arab Emirates. The Italian design has
been leading the industry since a century and although it has suffered the crisis now it
is on recovery path. The turnover for the Italian companies has been €40 billion in
201544 and it is expected to grow by 3,5% in 201645. Although the Italian market share
is the higher, the Italian company average turnover is €45 million46 almost the half
compared to the world average. Though, the market share is even higher in the so called
Pure Design industry, the high end design, standing at 39%.
The industry is in a turning point where it can embrace the new challenges and
successfully overcome them or become the investment fund shopping mall as already
40
Mancini, G. “Al design made in Italy il 30% del mercato”, Sole 24 Ore, 2015
http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/impresa-e-territori/2015-04-02/al-design-made-italy-30percento-mercato-
063838.shtml?uuid=ABanvMJD
41
42
43
Traldi, L. “L'italian design? Oggi sta benissimo. Ecco perché” La Repubblica, 2015
44
Lobetti Bodoni, P. “La rivoluzione nell’industria del Design – EY point of view – 2° Convegno Design”, 2016, pp 2
45
46
“Altagamma Bain Design Market Monitor”, Altagamma and Bain&Company, 2015, pp 3
13
happened in the Italian luxury boats and fashion industry. Among the new challenges,
the main ones include new export challenges development, adapting to the technological
pace, new synergies and alliances preparing the upcoming industry concentration and
facing the millennials’ challenges.
ii. The new environment

Millennials will account for 50% of the market within 202047 and being able to answer
to Millennials means adapting to the future customer and the technological changes
that the bulk of business are experiencing. E-commerce and the mobile revolution can
turn in powerful opportunities but also decree sounding losses. The design industry
suffers from a chronical and physiological underestimation of the interconnection and
ubiquity power given by the technology, above all the mobile ones. A closer look to the
market evidences concerning the mobile access provided by the Italian design
companies shows non optimized user experience, frequent absence or inadequacy of
online product listings and poor multichannel features48. Embracing the digital means
giving a ubiquitous access to different product ranges, facilitate purchases and
information gathering activities for the customer. It can lead to opening new channels,
acquire new customers and offering new services. The presence within new
marketplaces and aggregators is a must which decrease commissions costs and
competitions with the main players.
Companies have to adjust their business model components to the contemporary

environment and perception changes. If the technology has homogenised behaviours
from a geographical point of view, it equally differentiates them concerning the different
age groups. Indeed, Internet became the most used mean to discover new products,
brands and compare prices49 and the social networks play an important role: Instagram
is the most used social media to stay up to date with the lasts trend50, a tendency majorly
spread among millennials. The new customers rely on their peers’ opinions greatly while
editorials and magazines are used to draw inspiration regarding the purchased objects
physical placement 51 . Showroom changed their role following the same trend
experienced by clothes stores: customers go there to fill the physical gap since they are
able to touch the product, see their colours and smell them. In this contest, events role
is clear and can result in many positive outcomes. Customers feel the market as
overcrowded and depersonalized while within an event the brand have the possibility
to present itself and communicate in a unique way its value proposition. In the design
ecosystem, brands are losing their importance as primary purchase driver in favour of
the price and trend: events can be an opportunity to share the history brand, its main
characteristics and innovative components. Events can offer to the customers the
chances to customize their interaction with the brand creating a strong relationship.
Moreover, they can be a perfect meeting point to integrate the brand and its product
within professionals’ communities involving engaging them represented as one of the
critical success factor in this industry by EY52. Design events can support companies in
humanizing the brand and bringing it closer to its prospects and customers. An
47
48
49
Pambianco, D. “Mercato Italiano del Mobile. Millenial vs Adult”, 2016, pp 20
50
51
52
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incredible work has been done by Salone del Mobile organizers, also known as Design
week: the most important design events worldwide attended by design professionals and
design enthusiast. It recorded 370.000 attendants and the 67% were coming from
foreign countries, one of the greatest opportunities for Italian companies to make
themselves known and present new products and trends.
IV. Events management Literature review and Lean Startup

a. Events from academic point of view
i. Events evolution
Alongside Oxford Dictionaries definition, others gave their definition: an event can be
seen as “occurrences designed to communicate particular messages to target
audiences”53 nonetheless events powers are still underestimate and their benefits are
not perceived to exceed the costs. Within the different contexts mentioned above, events
are held for competition reasons: organizers have to be present at an event or organize
one because the competitors are going to be there and do one.
One of the most notably point of view belongs to Phil Crowther (2011). His argument in
favour of events importance runs as follows: events provide organizers a “distinct
“space” within which to connect with their market and stakeholders, a space that is
dissimilar to that offered by the other communications methods” 54 . According to
Crowther, events are a unique way to create an intimate space of interaction, a moment
where all the possible distractions and the external interferences can be taken apart
and a unique level of engagement can be reached. The interaction can be planned and
managed in a more precise way guarantying powerful outcomes. Under the term events
we enclose different organizational events with different marketing utilities functions:
from tradeshows to seminars and workshops, they provide different advantages and
simultaneously different drawbacks. Therefore, it is decisive the connection between
organizational strategy and event objectives which must be aligned to ensure the
highest event performances.
Lately, the perception on how event are conceived has changed significantly. They have
always been undervalued in favour of more dominant media already accomplished in
the marketing mix media scene. Fortunately, the importance of integrated marketing
communication rose among marketers’ priorities 55 fostering the embracement of
alternatives communication means such as events.
The event’s value has been examined by others researchers and academics who
connected events with the concept of “brand hyper-reality”56, “live communication”57
53
Kotler, P. (2002), Marketing Management, Eleventh Edition International, Pearson Education,
London. p 576
54
Crowther, P. (2011),"Marketing event outcomes: from tactical to strategic", International Journal of Event and
Festival Management, Vol. 2 Iss 1 pp. 69
55
Finne, A. and Groönroos, C. (2009), “Rethinking marketing communication: from integrated marketing
communication to relationship communication”, Journal of Marketing Communications, Vol. 15 Nos 2/3, pp. 179-195
56
Whelen, S. and Wholfeil, M. (2006), “Communicating brands through engagement with ‘lived’ experiences”, Brand
Management, Vol. 13 Nos 4/5, pp. 313-29.
57
Getz, D. (2007), Event Studies: Theory, Research, and Policy for Planned Events, Elsevier, Oxford, pp 203
15
and “live the brand” 58 . It hints about the connection that academics see between
experiential factors, reality related factors and events. Events are a living and active
component of the marketing mix enabling thus additional possibilities regarding the
kind of interaction that can be built with the stakeholders.
Experience is pivotal concerning events analysis. By examining events and their

potential, Crowther’s findings lend support to the claim that “the experience should be
informed and infused by a consistent narrative that is aligned to the marketing strategy
of the organisation. Hence, any fracturing of the relationship between strategy and the
event is problematic.”59. Given the centrality of this issue, it is important to further
underlining what Crowther is trying to explain: the experience that the planner want
to give to attendees, the deepest reason that motivated the event planning and
conceiving, has to be deeply imbued with the organization strategy and its long term
and short term objective and goals. Additionally, Crowther warns marketer and event
planners of the consequences that any misalignment between event attendees
experience and organizational strategy can cause such as “incongruous and eclectic
communication of the brand and the risk of uncoordinated, inconsistent, and perhaps,
excessive contact with the market and wider stakeholders.”60
Those misalignments can have many causes such as the involvement of different
entities within an event organization. Different organizational functions, depending on
the event characteristic – direct, as product launch and sponsorship, or indirect like
charity events – are going to be involved together with external agencies. Each of these
entities has its own understanding of brand image and values and miscommunications
risks are likely to arise.
ii. Nature of events

Although the events have been represented so far as powerful and unconventional
integrated communication tools, they have their own limitation among which the most
notable are the event success evaluation possibilities, the limitation that derives from
events’ reach, which is bounded to the attendees’ number, and the high costs that an
organization has to bear to organize and advertise events. On the basis of this evidence,
it seems fair to suggest that the event organization is an activity that cannot be
underestimated and should be delegated to event professionals. Moreover, if we add to
those innate event characteristics the dangers represented by a misalignment between
the event objectives and the organizational strategy it is easy to understand how
delicate is this marketing mix component. Nevertheless, the events’ benefits, if properly
exploited, are the so-called additional value of this marketing tool.
Events are “experiential, interactive, targeted and relational”61. Its experiential trait
allows events to create powerful connection with the attendees. We moved from the
definition of event as “occurrences designed to communicate particular messages to
58
Russel, S. (2007), “Experiential joins the marketing party”, B&T Weekly, Vol. 8, 23 March.
59
60
61
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target audiences” to the possibility of foster and nurture a long-term relationship
building and humanization process through events and consequent interaction 62 .
Events are seen as an extension of the humanization activity that organizations are
nowadays attempt to carry on in order to strengthen the relationship with their
stakeholders. Relationships need to be differentiated and tailored upon the different
stakeholders in order to construct communication strategies more personalised.
Adapting the communication tone and content to each different target and
simultaneously holding costs down has always been a challenge during times when
customization is a key in every touch point with the customer. The events contain
unstructured elements which allows each stakeholders to personalise the event
participation providing opportunities to experience an organization value proposition.
It is a smart and uncommon way to connect with stakeholder.
Throughout the marketing history, the marketing function evolved and adapted itself
to the target to whom this function aim. We can follow this evolution from the earliest
economy history days, when customers were looking for the products, to days when
firms where competing among themselves with a market oriented approach until now:
firms, and any other entities who aims to market a product or a service, use a melted
market and customer oriented approach. Within the contemporary economy, being
consumer oriented is not anymore sufficient: firms began collaborating with and
learning from customers while they are open and adaptive to their individual needs and
dynamic needs63. Accordingly, marketers shifted to do things “to” the customers to do
things “with and for” them64: co-creation is nowadays a reality that include product
design and marketing activities. In this context, marketing events turn to be highly
useful because they involve the stakeholders in an active and voluntary participation.
The different kind of events or so-called event platforms - that can be defined as “an
interactive environment, highly participative, promoting a collaborative experience
through which engage in ongoing conversation the customers” 65 – provide marketers
with a smart tool suitable for the contemporary age. In fact, modern customers are
responsive to “being marketed” attempts, for this reasons events provide smart changes
to communication methods consistent with those modern customers’ expectations. If we
see marketing as a tool for proactively anticipate product and service issues, event can
provide the suitable environment for this purpose and any other one connected with
gathering in one place not only customers but all the supply and customers chain actors.
The above mentioned shift in the organization approach towards customers implies
relationships constructions with them. Relational marketing rose in importance among
marketers who are now forced to evaluate customers and the other stakeholders as a
precious counterpart of this relationship. Events help marketing achieving this result
by creating a face-to-face interaction where the communication can be consistent and
integrated within the marketing mix. When we take a look at the definition of
relationship marketing - “the sum of all actions that convert the message and meaning
62
Gupta, S. (2003), “Event marketing: issues and challenges”, IIMB Management Review, June, pp. 87
63
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68
No. 1, pp. 6.
64
Vargo, S.L. and Lusch, R.F. (2004), “Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 68
No. 1, pp. 11
65
Kumar, R. (1997), “The role of affect in negotiations: an integrative overview”, The Journal of Behavioural Science,
Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 84-100.
17
in a mutually beneficial way and affects the knowledge base between parties”66 – is clear
how organizations, their relationship marketing strategies’ implementation and the
whole marketing strategy can benefit from events.
iii. Events Challenges and Opportunities

In the event environment, organizers have the chance to nurture their relationship with
their stakeholders. They can decide the communication tones, subjects and objectives.
Attendees are likely to be relaxed and more open to embrace this message. Additionally,
events have a strong pre-planned nature, it entails organizers are enabled to drive the
interaction, test it beforehand, have a concrete preview and figure out how they are
going to connect with the attendees. Everything can be planned in order to define even
the smaller details that often are the ones who more frequently stick in customers’ mind.
The steward welcoming process, the soap that attendees are going to use in the
bathroom, the items that they are going to hand out in the event premises, the event
premises itself, the smells and the sounds: everything can be a successful touchpoint
(Figure 867) and can help to move the attendees in a higher spot on the organization
loyalty ladder. Additionally, if the stakeholder turns to attendee it means they want to
voluntary participate in what an organization has prepared for them and it is not a
common circumstance. The marketing environment is plenty of communication form
where the recipient is a passive and inactive target68 leading to a decreased experience
for the recipients and throughout the years it caused a decreased the attention threshold
among people. Attention is nowadays one of the scarcest resource whose lack demands
organizers to deal with. Direct emails, advertising and e-marketing in general are all
old marketing techniques who tested dramatically recipients’ attention and tolerance.
Attendees participating to an event are there because they want to be there, they want
to actively be engaged, they are curious and interested. This different attitude enables
a fertile opportunity to establish, maintain, and enhance relationships 69: Participants
come at an event to be engaged and are likely to be more open to new engagement forms.
Figure 8
66
Lindberg-Repo, K. 2001. “Customer relationship communication: Analyzing communication from a value generating
perspective”, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration, Ekonomi och samhälle no. 99, Helsinki,
Finland. pp 19.
67
68
Duncan, T. and Moriarty, S. (1997), Driving Brand Value, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY
69
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According to Crowther 70 , the opportunities provided by events can be converted in
achievable objectives. In the Figure 9, we can see the various objectives that a company
can reach through marketing events. They range from tactical to strategical objectives
therefore related to short term and long term objectives. Of course, behind those
headings their declination depends on every company’s industry and organizational
context. The benefits exceed what some could define as pure marketing and sales
benefits. In fact, on one hand there are some primary objectives as customer profiling,
lead generation and brand developments and updates. On the other hand, events can
represent a precious opportunity to further evolve customer relationship leading the
stakeholder through new product development. Indeed, management decisions that
affect event design, delivery and evaluation needs to be originated by those objectives.
Following this evidence, the operational and logistics aspects must be crafted around
the objectives as well.
Figure 9
Events opportunities come along with events challenges and threats. As we said, events
characteristics can result in powerful outcomes such sales ones, communicational ones,
relational one and business intelligence related. Nevertheless, there is little control in
the communication content among those more closely bounded with brand
communication and relationship development. This lack of control is due to the
interactive nature of events: organizers can plan and test the interaction but it is tough
to foresee if it is going to match organizers forecasts. Whether organizers planned it
carefully or not, the brand is on display so they would better outline the interaction they
are going to implement rather than be negatively surprised by the possible occurrences.
Additionally, we mentioned organizers forecasts but they do have a more critical task:
meeting attendees’ forecasts, expectations and win the “influence game” by being able
to counter successfully their prejudgement. Creating a positive experience calls for
taking into account the thoughts and feelings that attendees have already in mind
before approaching the event. The event design process must be crafted around
attendees’ influences, motivations and expectations. With this in mind, we acknowledge
the importance of this prejudgement in shaping the event outcomes. By keeping the
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focus on attendees’ influence and expectations, organizers are going to deliver
experience that fit attendees imagination and simultaneously help them to reach
communication objectives.
Moreover, organizers face communicational related issues. What can be seen as

marginal or external is nevertheless linked to the brand and its image. Touchpoints are
behind every corner (see Figure 8) and are a meaningful opportunity to interact with
the attendees and turn them from prospects into customers and from customers to brand
ambassadors. It is a decisive challenge for the brand because the presence of this
numerous touchpoints and brand related information and communication sources
generate several issues about the control of this source and the consistency about the
communication.
As well as the consistency and content communication issues, organizers choice became
even more strategical when they have to identify the best event platform. Organizers
need to be driven by the organization’ objectives as first priorities, the success will derive
by adapting each platform features, advantages and challenges to the objectives. When
event management decisions determine the adaptation conditions with the objectives
the consequences can be really dangerous. The different available platforms we all have
experienced and encountered are exhibition conferences, seminars (learning events),
corporate hospitality, product launch, sponsorship of other events (e.g. entertainment,
culture, sport), philanthropic events, roadshow, trade shows/fairs and award
ceremonies. The more specific they are, the more specific will be the objective that can
be achieved and the challenges that organizers will face.
Adapting all the event elements to the organizational objectives is not costless. An event
entails relevant opportunity and monetary cost, indeed it is not an opportunity that can
be wasted. Organizers have the possibility to deliver significant value to attendees who
usually participate to events to access this subjective value. To this end, the value
delivered to the participant needs to overcome the value that the absents will attempt
to take over and it represents a further challenge for the event planners. Through the
combination of the event design elements such as education, social and entertainment
variables this value can be optimised and shaped around each attendee’s profile: setting
these variables in order to fit stakeholders needs.
Finally, the organization stakeholders represent a valuable source of information that

a company can exploit when arrives the moment to take decisions that can influence the
organizations departments. For this reason, organizations have the possibility to fully
exploit that information if they are open to what the stakeholders are going to
communicate. Though, events have the opportunity to be a business intelligence source
that can result in immediate outcomes such feedbacks and reviews. If organizers will
structure events accordingly they will be able also to obtain much more strategical
information that can enable them to better conceive the marketing strategy through the
insights gained. As we can see, the evidence showed above demonstrates unequivocally
that events are equally high in risk as opportunity71.
b. The Lean Startup Methodology Analysis
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i. A Lean Startup Methodology Introduction
As we have seen, events unlock many potentials and challenges. We need an approach
that can help us identify which can be the potentials that needs to be leveraged and
which the challenges that we have to face and successfully win. The engagement
opportunities provided by events can be profitably exploited if we include in our
investigation activities the target of the product we are analysing. This study is an
attempt to address the issue of finding what can fill the gap in the event app market,
with a focus on the design event app market. We went through the importance of events,
their relevance and role as communication and marketing tool as well as experiential
marketing mix component. We are now going to examine the methodology we will use
to draw relevant management conclusion and provide useful insight regarding what the
design event app market is missing out. An analysis of what Lean Startup methodology
is will give us a better understanding of the reason behind its importance and
revolutionary capacity.
In the last 30-40 years of the economy history, entrepreneurship has always been done
in the old same way: someone had an idea about a product and started investing in his
or her idea in order to bring it on the market as soon as possible. This approach was not
based on any market research but often pushed by personal intuition, needs or wishes.
Both the knowledge-based and resource-based approach led thousands of people to
invest their money with the certainty they would have been able to convince customers
to buy what they were producing.
If this approach could work in a world without goods that today we consider as
commodity ones, it absolutely cannot work in our fast developing, interconnected and
highly customizable reality. Throughout the years, companies began embracing this
way of thinking: co-creation processes, open innovation and crowd generated ones are
rising in popularity and spread quickly in the corporate reality. Nevertheless, the Lean
Startup Methodology changes the overarching process of having an idea and implement
it. It’s a transversal attitude that can be usefully implemented in several fields. It
entails doing more in order to achieve something valuable faster than before, it demands
a continuous commitment in rapidly adapting our ideas to the changes, it prevents from
wasting time in creating something unneeded optimizing the available resource and
processes. The lean startup methodology takes its name from the lean manufacturing
developed at Toyota: it is a set of principles among “drawing on the knowledge and
creativity of individual workers, the shrinking of batch sizes, just-in-time production and
inventory and an acceleration of cycle times control” 72 . It is a comprehensive
entrepreneurship theory that aims at enabling progress measurements in an extremely
uncertain context.
ii. Lean Startup Methodology’s Five principles

The lean startup methodology is based on five principles. Entrepreneurship is
considered ubiquitous, wherever there is a “human institution designed to create new
72
Ries, E. “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful
Businesses”, Crown Business New York, 2011, pp 28
21
products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty” 73 there can be an
entrepreneur thus enabling any enterprise size to apply this methodology.
Entrepreneurship demands a management equipped with tools that can support in
facing the uncertainty typical of business context. Validation has a fundamental role
because by validating the learnings we lay the foundation to build a sustainable
business. Everything we have in our mind concerning the business is a hypothesis
unless it is continuously tested in order to validate and secure it. Ries describes as the
fundamental startup activities build-measure-trust74: turn ideas into products, measure
the customers’ answers and learn if what they are building is appealing for the
customers. Finally, boring and analytical tasks improve entrepreneurial outcomes:
measuring the progress, setting milestones and planning the work prioritization.
The lean startup provide with a better approach for the modern age. It is aligned with
the uncertainty conditions with which startups often deal with. In a corporate context,
the traditional management tools, albeit not the most performant ones, can be applied
because traditional firms lie in a static environment and above all have a history that
they can question when scheduling planning and forecasting activities.
iii. The Lean Startup’s contributions

Ries introduces the feedback loop concept which can be defined as a situation where
part of the output is used for new input: it is a cyclical process where its effect reunites
with its cause generating the similar consequences. In particular, Ries talks about a
specific feedback loop called Build-Measure-Learn which allows to quickly take decision,
implement them and evaluate results as we will see better in a while. The lean startup
methodology is thought to help “anyone who is creating a new product or business under
conditions of extreme uncertainty”75. Whoever found himself within this situation feel
specific needs related to their idea validation issues, the project management activities
and the measurements efficiency: these are transversal difficulties that go beyond the
business context and affect several fields and activities.
Ries propounds the view that learning is the most vital entrepreneurship function76.
The learning outcomes can vary and concern all the entrepreneurial dimensions: an
entrepreneur must be ready to understand whether or not his hypothesis were true or
must be reformulate. So will anyone who is investigating a thesis and looks for answers
to a determined problem. In order to restore learning capabilities, the Lear Startup
Methodology propose a more accurate learning process called “validate learning”77. Its
major advantage is the support provided in one of the startups most dangerous problems
the plan execution without clear objectives in mind. One of the biggest question when
anyone undertake an activity under uncertainty condition is which actions are value-
creating which are wasteful, it is where everything started: at Toyota engineers were
73
74
75
76
77
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wondering the same question because by optimizing time and resources, we can focus
on what matters, we can be faster and implement changes quicker than before. Validate
learning provide tools to answer to this questions and revolutionize the way we learn:
there is no need to have a functioning and features crowded product to receive the
answer we are looking for. We first need to understand if our presumed buyer is
interested in what we are building before to understand if it is attracted by its features.
Furthermore, it is called validate learning because the results of the learning process
validate it: if we apply what we have been learned, we experience it within the metrics
we set up to understand our progress and if we are achieving our goals.
These direct correspondence between learning consequences and metrics changes

further shows one of validate learning advantages: when we have concrete insights and
measurements that can be showed to anyone we gain credibility and have the possibility
to adapt the feedbacks checking faster the results.
iv. Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop

Before deepening the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, we have to premise we write
the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn but the planning works in the reverse order:
we figure out what we need to learn, we understand what we need to measure to know
if validated the learnings, and finally we figure out what we need to build to run that
experiment and get that measurement78. The power of this tool lays not in the activities
itself but in minimizing the time spent in each single cycle activities and between each
of them.
We early stated that Lean Startup approach bring the scientific method through
entrepreneurship thus proving the effectiveness of this methodology throughout many
field. If we approach any casual activity while keeping in mind we have a series of
hypothesis to test, and we have to shorten the time between testing those hypotheses in
order to implement the results as soon as possible, it is easily observable how powerful
can be the results of such approach. The author talks about two main hypotheses the
value hypothesis and growth hypothesis and asserts entrepreneur initial main task is
building an organization that can test assumptions quickly and avoid to lose the focus
on startup vision while doing it. The importance of testing these assumptions, which
can hide incredible opportunities or catastrophic failures, lays in the uncertainty
conditions among which the startups operate. Customers change daily their
preferences, competitors became everyday stronger and sharp and the technology
increased its evolution pace. Indeed, hypothesises testing should be considered as a
precondition before any investment and personal economic resource commitment.
The two above mentioned hypothesis are the first that need to be tested and include
other assumptions that usually derive from these ones. We have to understand if the
product or service we aim to create is a value-creating or value-destroying one and if the
growth we expect will be sustained from the value we are aspire to create.
The Lean Startup Methodology integrates Steve Blank’s Customer Discovery:

entrepreneurs and anyone else that is creating something have to “get out of the
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building” in order to understand the environment where they will operate, their targets’
needs and expectations. Steve Blank, which advised Ries in one of his venture, created
the customer discovery approach through which the process starts with the discovery of
what customers think about the problem and the proposed solution continuing with
customer validation where entrepreneurs understand if they have a product customers
want to buy79. Customer Discovery approaches next stages are customer creation and
the last is company building. The Blank theory entails a restrained resources
consumption, allows to acquire a full understanding before coming to the company
building moment and anticipate several issues that turn to be significantly dangerous.
Therefore, among the hypothesises to test, entrepreneurs have to understand who their
customers are and what move them: their real feeling, their attitude towards the
problem an entrepreneur want to solve and their perception about the solution that the
entrepreneur identified.
Once we build our hypothesises, we have to test them. Ries introduces the MVP concept:
he suggests the usage of the version of a product or a service which owns the
fundamental features, the ones that will be used to tackle the problem in order to make
tests as much useful as possible. As we said, the real value of the Build-Measure-Learn
feedback loop lays in the possibility to shorten considerably the time between each stage
in order to take advantage from the insight gained faster. Through the MVP, we acquire
noteworthy information and possibly can come to the conclusion that what we are
building is not found to be useful by anyone all this keeping costs low and starting
shaping a relationship with the people who feel the most the problem the entrepreneur
aims at solving. As written by Ries, “any additional work beyond what was required to
start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time”80.
Lean Startup’s focus is always on optimization of time and resource and demands to
those who aim at applying it a total beliefs and prejudgements abnegation.
Entrepreneurs own wishes and certainties have to be rejected in favour of the
information gathered on the field through the tests.
Measuring is part of the feedback loop that is one of the major contribution that the
Lean Startup gives us. In fact, a startup needs always to understand where it is found
to be, comparing its expectations with the harsh reality. Measurements also serve as
benchmark giving a continuous answer concerning how much close or far we are from
the goals. Entrepreneurship is imbued with optimism. It can be fine unless it
overwhelms everyone. Analytical approaches are required in a delicate and uncertain
context and even more needed because when one cannot compare himself with anyone
since there is not competition or market how a complete understanding of product
advancements and milestones could be possible 81 ? Measurements are demanded
because it has both a strategical and operational importance the understating of the
relation between the actions undertaken by a company and the effects. By measuring
what a company does, it became controllable if previous lessons have been learned and
successfully implemented.
79
Blank, S.G., 2007. The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Cafepress. com, p 19.
80
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For a better measurement results, it is highly suggested to be as much specific as
possible in order to enlarge the perspective that can be acquired. It helps to connect
causes and effects, take more conscious decisions and have an overview that mirrors the
reality. Above all, by being specific we can apply our learning in different context and
draw different conclusions. Being aware of the dangers of metrics that can bring a
company off the road, we use the measurements of what we have built to gather data
that we will use to take decision. This is the learning moment when an entrepreneur
decides if pivot or persevere. The pivot is defined as a movement where “we keep one foot
rooted in what we’ve learned so far, while making a fundamental change in strategy in
order to seek even greater validated learning.”82. If an entrepreneur decides to go along
this way and manage to do it with a lower cost, faster and with less risks than in the
past credits go to the methodology created by Ries. Pivots gave birth to numerous
contemporary billion dollar companies such as YouTube, Instagram, PayPal and
Groupon83 to mention just some. It is a powerful tool, which avoid entrepreneurs to
waste what they have learned until that moment and on the contrary use this
knowledge to change the initial perspective, beliefs and point of view and aim at
different goals. Pivots became fundamental in startups lives, in fact is the availability
of pivots and how many of them are possible which set the tone of the situation. The
feedback loop that Ries proposes give endless possibilities and it is significantly valuable
how the tools and methodologies give can be transversal and provide utility in different
fields and contexts.
V. Methodology analysis
a. The methodology
In this section we are now going to introduce the methodology used to address the issue
proposed in this research paper. We aimed at finding a solution for the design events
app: a solution able to answer to the overlooked design events attendees’ needs.
The approach that has been used involves the understanding of which is the current
situation where events apps are acting as of now in order to be able to formulate which
could be the proper changes that can be proposed. We analysed the events app market
main actors and their offerings with the purpose of depicting the current landscape. The
focus has been on which features are generally provided. The aim was to figure out if
the users were finding those features useful and if there was room for further
modifications. It is common to acknowledge that features that the app designers found
to be necessary are not even used or noticed. Besides, it is likewise common to observe
features that are used in a different way and for different purposes compared to which
they have been thought for, an example can be WhatsApp that is used at supermarket
or clothes store to show other users what they have or have not to buy or Twitter used
by people to share information during the Arab Spring. Today, it is considered a normal
usage of these apps but the founders could never have imagined their technology would
have been used in this way. We aspire to understand if there are similar cases that can
also happen concerning revenue streams. The app providers are making money through
certain sources but by analysing users behaviours can be possible to understand if other
82
83
Nicholas Thomas, 2011. “11 Startups That Found Success by Changing Direction”. Mashable
25
revenue opportunities can be exploited. Indeed, it can happen in both direction – what
we thought could have been a revenue stream does not reveal itself as such or users are
willing to pay for something we neither think they could be interested in. An example
can be the $1 subscription that WhatsApp wanted to charge to its users, a decision they
withdrawn later on, and Tinder plus (premium accounts unlocking new features such
as Undo, which allows to go back to a profile skipped by mistake, and Passport, which
“change your location to match with people around the world!84”), which none believed
could bring profit while Tinder reported to have 1 million paying monthly customers85
on May 3rd, 2016. Such examples provide confirmatory evidence that events apps could
achieve significant results by implementing user centred adjustments.
Additionally, we narrowed the focus to design events app in order to be able to give
meaningful recommendations that, however, could be transposed to other fields. In fact,
we wanted to avoid achieving generic results that would not have been able to be
translated in concrete results. Yet, we chose the design industry because it has its own
significance within the Italian economy and the worldwide one – the industry accounts
for €360 billion if we include the white label products86 - combining a high degree of
innovation adoption and pretentiousness regarding technology aesthetic and functional
aspects. After reaching an understanding of the existent business models, we
formulated the value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis87 in order to create a
baseline for the interviews. Rather than formulating a myriad of hypothesises related
to the countless features that an app can provide, we preferred to adopt a different
approach. Probably, the companies which provided the currently available apps
employed this methodology too: they also approached this problem formulating a value
creation and growth hypothesises but, as we will show later, the outcomes of this choice
did not result in any visible consistent consequence with modern users. Our work’s
purpose regards the demonstration of what the existing apps are missing. Through the
interviews, we are going to prove they did not keep up with the fast changing and
evolving users’ needs. Surely, when the apps have been developed the overall set of
features appeared to be sufficient but users evolve as well their app usage. If we look to
the most successful apps, we can observe how they did not stay steady: they have been
shaped around the users. The users have been the main drivers leading the app
evolution, which changed together with the changes occurred to the users’ usage. We
believe events app have evolved throughout time on the technological side
underestimating users’ needs. With this in mind, we had to identify which people could
give a worthwhile contribution according to their role.
b. Interviews’ choices drivers

Three main users’ categories have been identified according to the design event frequent
attendees. We excluded the “random users”: nowadays design became a fashion trend
which attracts a wide range of amateurs driven more by a passing fad than by a true
84
Perez, S. “Tinder Plus, The Paid Version Featuring An Undo Button And More, Arrives In U.S. Next Month”,
TechCrunch, 2015
85
Statt, N., “Tinder now has more than 1 million paying customers”, The Verge, 2016
86
87
26
interest of any sort. By interviewing those causal attendants, we would have had
misleading outcomes. These people are not driven by design related interests but
participate to design events as they would do with a concert or a stage show: they feel
general needs which are not related with the reasons and goals of a design events
attendant. The most valuable contributions are more likely to come from people which
are related to the design environment and would fine a real utility if they could attend
an event with the support of an app truly tailored upon their needs. For this reason, we
decided to select design students, design professionals and design academics.
The choice has been led by the willingness to address the problem leveraging three
different yet relevant point of views. Generally, the three profiles correspond to different
ages as well. The students were between 20 and 30 years old, the professionals were
between 30 and 40 and the academics between 40 and 60. Fortunately, we could not
only take advantage of the different perspective due to their status – student,
professionals and academics – but also to their different age. As we said, technology
brought us closer from the geographical point of view but distanced ourselves from the
usage point of view: each different age range uses technology differently. Consequently,
we want the research to mirror these differences in order to point out events apps have
to take into account these differences too.
The student has been chosen as an early adopter: young people are usually more likely
to embrace technological changes as well as they are interested in updates and
improvements that could make their life easier. Additionally, they use a lot of
heterogeneous technologies as a result they can have more inspirations which vary
among them according to the technological area those inspirations come from. Moreover,
design students have needs closer to people external to the design environment because
they are new to this world since they approached it recently causing a double effect: on
one hand their contributions can be among the most transversal regarding other fields
while on the other hand they have a mindset which differ from people who have been in
this industry in the last 20-30 years. A genuine and fresh point of view can help to look
at a problem with a different attitude and from a different perspective. A young user
profile such the design student can see more integration with existent technology: an
older user suggests what he or she would like to have but one who is used to deal often
with technology does not want to abandon his or her technological applications and it is
more in favour of integrations. The students that have been chosen come from some of
the most prestigious Design universities in Milan, the world design capital, NABA,
“Nuova Accademia Belle Arti”, and IULM, International University of Language and
Media. We tried to select different ages and different backgrounds in order to increase
the variety of the contributions.
Design professionals can give really business related contributions. Their feet are
ditched on the ground: they are really pragmatic and always need extra time. These
profile could give absolutely time driven insights. People who work have always a
mindset oriented to the optimization of their available time. Additionally, they have a
double role: they can use the app as event attendants but if they are going to enjoy the
experience and come to the conclusion that others did it as well they can become even
client of that app. Indeed, this users’ category can avail itself of such apps when
organizing its own events. As well as, they have a more extended range of needs related
to the organizational side of an event and are oriented to give feedbacks related to this
necessity: they now can find themselves on the opposite side of the attendees and are
27
well-disposed in providing those kind of insights. Of course, also the design student and
the design academic are likely to organize events but the design professional is more
likely to do it, more frequently than them. Design professionals are also highly
pretentious and want both a high level of service and aesthetic components. They are
driven by their professional bias through their judgement since what is design if not the
combination of aesthetic and usefulness? Finally, design professionals have what
neither design students or academics own: they have the experience gathered around
the world. They saw how design has changed and evolved together with the technology
and are aware of how in other part of the world living a design event is changing also
through the usage of technology. Consequently, they can bring this perspective and
provide contributions enriched by what they have already seen in the industry. We
chose four different design professionals profile coming from two of the most important
design studios in Milan. In particular, one of them has a highly international profile
and is used to attend design events and design awards. All the profiles usually attend
design events, also international ones, and found themselves to be organizers, exhibitors
and attendants.
Finally, the choice of the design academics has been led by both their prestige and the
role they had in the story of design events. Of course, they bring their longer experience
given their age and a different set of needs. More importantly, academics are used to
work within the education field and the field of their teaching, at least in Italy is very
common due to the professors’ low wages, meaning that they organize and attend this
two different types of events. Indeed, through their insights we are going to explore
what design events app can do in the education field. Education related events are really
common since people are willing to keep up with the field where they work and gain the
freshest and most innovative knowledge. In addition, academics are often researchers:
they observe and examine their field of study and follow its evolution through the time.
It is a perspective that design professionals and design students are less likely to have.
Thus, academics have a clear understanding of the past and are updated about where
the future is going in their discipline. Moreover, in 2016 everything is hyper-connected
so the knowledge exchanges are faster than in the past and deeply affected by other
academics’ influences and researches which will make the interviews results more
complete. The academics chosen work in “Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera”, a leading
worldwide fine arts institution, and in the Design Department of “Politecnico di Milano”.
They have a different past, the “Accademia di Brera” one is trying to put in contact the
academic world with the business one therefore events are an important part of this
strategy. On the other hand, the “Politecnico” ones contributed to the evolution of the
most important design events in the world: The Design week.
c. Qualitative research value
Next, we formulated the value creation and value growth analysis and proceeded with
the interviews. A qualitative market research has been preferred to a quantitative one
because the driver in the choice has been the quality of the results we were expecting.
Interviews leave more freedom to the interviewed which usually increase its
contributions going beyond what is asked. Of course, it is something that has to be
controlled in order to keep the focus of the interview centred to what it is really
important to the research. However, in a face to face interviews by letting the
interviewed talk and express his or her own opinions the results can be remarkable.
People love to express their own opinion and love when some listen to them and value
28
what they are saying: it is not common when someone pay attention to what we are
talking about and if one is doing that to help to solve a problem and satisfy a need the
outcomes can be positively unpredictable. In contrast, survey and quantitative research
can only help to understand if what we were think was right or not. Respondents are
bound to the answers proposed by surveys and questionnaires and they do not have the
room to say what they are thinking. Quantitative researches are limited by our beliefs
enabling researchers to achieve confirmations or denials but not further results. We
wanted more specific insights related to a deep understanding of what apps could
possibly miss and users’ perception about what it is already available. In particular,
face-to-face interviews creates connections between the interviewer and the
interviewed: the first can identify even the smaller cues and interpret interviewed
feelings, the latter has an intimate and personal moment where he or she can truly
share his or her opinions, emotions and intuitions. For the reasons above demonstrated,
we evaluated qualitative research, such as the interviews, more coherent with the kind
of problem we are addressing and with our goals concerning the information nature we
expected and needed.
VI. Data collection process and major issues faced
a. Data gathering challenge and process
We began by looking for the main competitors in the app events market. So papers and
market reports have been examined to understand which was the state of art in the
industry. In fact, in this industry is very tough for the app providers to draw insiders’
attention: for the app providers is a business-to-business commerce because their goal
is to sell their apps to event organizers, marketing managers or event professionals and
make them understand the values of their app compared to the crowd of apps which is
offering mostly the same features. Indeed, we truly believe our findings will be only a
part of the contribution we want to give because the other part is the approach that who
wants to develop an app for event, specifically design events, has to change. Features
can be copied, more or less, what cannot be copied is the attention to users’ needs, the
dedication to them and the willingness to evolve with them and provide a tool that can
grow together with their usage of the technology. As aforementioned, we noticed is very
hard for the app providers to reach their customers and for this reasons they started to
create EBooks which they freely distribute through their websites. They usually review
the event apps market landscape trying to show that their product is better than the
competitors one. Indeed, this has been one of the toughest task: achieving an
understanding of the events app landscape has been really complicated. Of course, it
would have been impossible to download all the apps in the market so we had to use
these reports and keep an impartial point of view.
Subsequently, we wanted to narrow the focus. Events are already something so

widespread and heterogeneous: it is an industry entirely transversal because events are
organized in every field. Yet, events cross the borders of the business environment: we
can observe religious, political and philanthropic events commonly organized. For this
reason, we had to make a choice concerning which field we wanted to explore. At the
same time, we did not want to select an area of interest too limited. If we would have
done so, the findings would have been restricted to that field while we wanted our
contribution to be as much useful as possible. Indeed, selecting the right field has been
difficult: we made many changes before the final choice.
29
Once we allayed our doubts, we selected the design industry. This choice caused some
issues regarding the identification of the exact borders of the design sector. Design has
become an interdisciplinary field whose findings have proved to result in beneficial
consequences towards diverse areas of interest. We have design thinking, industrial
design, fashion design, service design and graphic design just to mention some. In fact,
each of them has its own issues and the choice would have included their respective
drawbacks and advantages. We aimed at finding a well-known field in which events are
a significant component of the ecosystem, a field whose findings could have been useful
for other area of interest too. After we chose the industrial design, the challenge was
acquiring knowledge about the numbers of this industry. The various reports were
unclear and inaccurate: they collected information about different industrial design
fields so the presented values were not precise and would not have been significant for
the research. We encountered a lack of resources related to the design industry across
the various databases because it is really difficult to enclose the industrial designs
bounds. The issue is whether or not including the field where industrial design is used
such as architecture, furniture, interiors decoration, just to mention some. Of course,
excluding one of this field would have meant on one hand renouncing to the events
organized within that environment and on the other hand gaining more clarity and
decreasing the confusion. Since we knew the choice would have affected the remaining
process we decided to direct the focus on the furniture industrial design. The choice
would have resulted in interviewing people who come from that field, so we chose the
field that presented the best trade-off between the ease of getting in contact with the
insiders and the value of the contribution they would have been able to provide: we
thought the furniture industrial design field’s members would have been the choice most
coherent with this trade-off.
At this point we developed the value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis: the
industry is really challenging and demanding but we were sure that it was missing
incremental improvements and the contact with the modern users need and we tried to
figure it out. We lingered on this hypothesises and did not deepen further because we
wanted to open the path to who is going to address the needs we aim at highlighting but
a more specific analysis would have taken more time and testing. Indeed, we started
with these two hypothesis to create a baseline for the interviews but, as we are going to
show later on, the interviews opened up numerous possibilities that would have taken
too much time to be explored. For this reason, we proceeded by suggesting
improvements that can be implemented in the existing apps’ features set.
b. Interviews issues
The evaluation of the interviews profiles has required a thorough approach. We had to
identify, between the available alternatives, which profile would suit the requirements.
We needed prospect app users with different backgrounds because if we would have
included only people who have worked for their entire life in the design industry their
feedbacks would have been flawed by the perspective that typically one acquires when
is excessively affected by the area of interest of his or her work. Conversely, as we said
we could neither choose complete newbies. We took the decision to evaluate each
interview candidate according to the contribution that he or she could give not only to
the overall research but also to the user category he or she belonged. We wanted both
each user category insights and the overall findings to be balanced mirroring as much
30
as possible the heterogeneity of needs and problems perceived by the users. Concerning
the design students, we could not choose too young ones because they would not have
any idea: we needed candidates in the middle of their experience. With this in mind, we
would have been able to select someone who had already started to create his own ideas
of his design related needs but in the middle of this process. Additionally, we had the
possibility to interview student coming from different background of the design
environment: a food design, a design gallerist and a product design. They were also
coming from different countries which allowed the result to be imbued with their
different cultures. Of course, it has been really challenging to convince them to share
their opinions because people always see an ulterior motive in what you are doing. It
has been a long and intensive persuasion work which also caused some delays in the
whole research but such contributions are the heartbeat of such management project.
If we have talked about the issues encountered involving students imagine what it has
been trying to involve design professionals. The initial idea was to contact them during
the design week to arrange the appointments during this period: nothing more wrong.
During the most important design event in the world they are extremely overloaded and
unapproachable. Of course, they have not only to organize the most important exhibition
of the year but also to keep an eye on the competitors and what they are doing. Indeed,
they have to live the event in a double way as exhibitor and as attendant. As I said,
interviewing people who work entails even more criticalities since differently from the
students if they have free time they do not like to spend it with someone who ask them
questions. Also, they often travel, for example there was a design professional who was
used to attend different Design awards around the world so it has been really difficult
to find time in the agenda of such people usually busy and stressed by a frenetic lifestyle.
The major difficulties have been concerning the interviews arrangement since they were
continuing postponing and changing the day in general. Of course, we renounced to the
interview throughout the design week. After the arrangement, we had to overcome their
emotional barriers. We meant to be taken seriously, all the interviews have been
conducted in the most serious and professional way but they still were seeing a 23-year-
old guy asking question about what they would have included in their ideal app and
people were struggle to believe it was all for research purpose. Unfortunately, in Italy
is normal to distrust others – 70% of Italians do not trust their peers88 - and it resulted
in lower productivity slowing down activities such these ones. It has not to be
underestimated the effort to keep focus of the interview straight on the interview
purpose. Above all in such context, they were trying to push their own idea while
distancing themselves from their own interest and trying to give an impartial and
objective opinion.
Concerning the academics, we wanted to further complement the prestige gained with
the professionals. In fact, we managed to involve the “Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera”
General Director and two professors from “Politecnico di Milano” Design Department.
The “Accademia” is a leading fine art institution which hosted the most important art
exhibition throughout the nineteen century, artist like Hayez taught there and its
legacy has been transmitted over the time. The Director was not what we would call a
technology early adopter and the discussion has been really challenging but he
acknowledged the importance of events above all in a particular historic moment when
the “Accademia” is trying to be more oriented to the business side. The discussion
88
“Il benessere equo e sostenibile in Italia 2014”, Istat, 2014, pp 9
31
became occasionally philosophical and it required a careful focus on the research
purpose. Given the prestigious of the “Politecnico” professors, we had to chase them. In
particular, one of them helped the transformation of the Design week in its modern
version. With both the director and these professors one of the most demanding task
has been converting in meaningful insights their talks. In fact, we are talking about
people which are used to deal with technology but have some prejudgments about the
effects that the increasing usage of the technology can cause. The attempt of overcoming
their beliefs and turn their ideas into contributions has been really time consuming and
has required an accurate interview preparation.
In conclusion, we had to integrate these findings in the existing business models. We

chose to propose incremental improvements to what the existing app providers have
been doing. Indeed, we had to make a selection of the various interviews insights. As we
previously stated, sometimes people tend to provide advices that can be useful only to
them or are not aware that what they are asking for is already available. Identifying
the truly valuable information and combining them in the existing framework has been
probably the most challenging task.
VII. Data analysis
a. Existing apps providers’ analysis
Event technology can successfully support organization to host events and reach and
measure the event objectives. The choice of which technology applies the most to each
organization type of events, events’ goals and events participants’ expectations is truly
arduous and require events’ organizers to take into account several variables. We
noticed the bulk of apps provider have really similar offerings and we are going to
highlight the main actors’ offerings. Through the Event App Bible 201689, a free report
created by the most popular resource for event professionals – EvenManagerBlog.com a
website that gathers together the biggest LinkedIn groups of event professionals which
numbers over three hundred thousand members –, we accessed the table of the features
shared by more than one hundred twenty-five app providers90 (see the Appendix A, B
and C). We can observe how the features are classified in six different categories: event
management features, networking enabling features, content related features, app
technological specifications & support features, integration features and location and
travel related features. We are going to see that the biggest companies propose a very
similar set of features to their customers and it will allow us to formulate the value
creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis. In fact, only by achieving an understanding
of what it already available in the market we would have been able to approach the
interviews with the proper attitude investigating more carefully which are the true
customers’ needs.
We had to find the correct criteria to analyse the current landscape in the events apps
market and we decided to adopt the rates received by the users. Through the research
“Battle of events apps”91, we have learned there are ten main companies which provide
89
Solaris, J., Cross, B., Bruno, M., Segar, A., “The Event App Bible 2016”, Event Manager Blog, 2016
90
Solaris, J., Cross, B., Bruno, M., Segar, A., “The Event App Bible 2016”, Event Manager Blog, 2016, pp. 47
91
“Battle of events apps”, CadmiumCD Resources, 2015
32
together thirty-four hundred apps 92 . Only forty-four out of thirty-four hundred are
rated. In the Figure 1093 we can see the total rates share between these companies.
Figure 10
The apps providers among which the rates are split are CadmiumCD, DoubleDutch,
Guidebook, CrowdCompass, Core-Apps, a2z, ATIV Software, Quickmobile, EventMobi
and Pathable. Each of them developed several events apps but they all have a flagship
product which mirrors the company focus in the event technology field. Before further
deepening the above mentioned flagship apps, we wanted our analysis to be even more
selective: we excluded the app providers without any rates (Quickmobile, EventMobi
and Pathable) and the ones that reported the highest number of 0-2 stars’ ratings as we
can see in Figure 1194.
92
“Battle of events apps”, CadmiumCD Resources, 2015, pp. 3
93
94
33
Figure 11
If we confront the 0-2 stars’ chart with the one which displays the app with the most 4-
5 stars’ rates, we can notice that some companies are in both chart as showed by Figure
1295.
Figure 12
We dealt with the situation by comparing the two charts:
95
34
App provider: 0-2 Star 0-2 star 4-5 Stare 4-5 star Total
rate number of rate number of number of
app app app
developed
CadmiumCD x 1 x 19 23
DoubleDutch x 2 x 2 6
Guidebook x 1 x 5 6
CrowdCompass x 4 - - 5
Core-Apps - - x 1 2
a2z x 1 - - 1
ATIV Software x 1 - - 1
Table 1
It is easily observable in the Table 1 that although almost all of the apps included in the
Table where in both chart we cannot proceed our research analysing all of them. As a
matter of fact, CrowdCompass, a2z and ATIV Software had five, one and one app each
among the most rated by the users, nevertheless CrowdCompass reported four out of
five app rated with 0-2 star, a2z had one out of one and as well ATIV Software. This has
been the reason why we excluded them from our analysis together with the app
providers which do not have been rated by their users. Furthermore, we can notice that
the remaining apps providers - except Core-Apps - CadmiumCD, DoubleDutch and
Guidebook place some of their apps in the 0-2 stars’ rate chart. Notwithstanding, we
comprehend these app providers in our research because as we can note the apps which
have 0-2 stars rate are, respectively, the 4%, 30%, 16% of the total apps developed by
these companies: these percentages have been positively judged especially if we take
into account that they are anyway able to offer, in addition to the 4-5 star ones, three
(CadmiumCD) and two (DoubleDutch) apps which are rated from more than two stars
to less than four ones (Guidebook has not middle ground: this company has five 4-5
stars app and one 0-2 stars over six developed).
We can now examine the flagship products offered by these app providers and their
features. CadmiumCD offers a modular mobile app in fact they have a set of event
softwares that can help organizer manage an event in every aspect. The app is called
eventScribe 96 and has several features of the ones reported in the Appendixes (see
Appendix A, B and C. On the attendees’ side, it enables them to take notes about the
session content, hours and schedules, the speakers can be contacted directly by the
audience, which is also able to answer to live polling. Additionally, the social network
integration is enabled meaning that users can import their information and contact
network from these existing platforms. We all know events facilitate gamification
opportunities, eventScribe allows to create live contests and leader-board. On the
organizers side, such apps can support in revenue generation activities such
sponsorship selling and brand communication since empower brand with full
customization features. Of course, eventScribe offers the possibility to adapt the app to
every change that may occur to the schedule: such as sessions, exhibitors and speakers’
changes. Besides, the app can be used for different kind of events such as educational,
associative and corporate ones. Finally, eventScribe has a directory from which different
96
CadmiumCD , https://www.eventscribe.com/CadmiumCD/products-app.asp, July, 2016
35
apps for different events can be managed and offers also the opportunity to adapt the
app language to the users one.
DoubleDatch offers a Live Engagement Event app97, as we can see from the name the
focus is on engaging the attendees. Participants have a news feed, are involved in the
discussion through games, points and badges that they can earn. Interaction is fostered
thanks to live polling and surveys features. Moreover, DoubleDatch offers the
opportunity to improve the events through participants’ feedbacks and ratings. As we
said the interaction quality, between the attendees and the event and among the
attendees themselves, has a high importance degree: attendees are provided with an
attendees list, they can exchange private message and organize meetings among them.
Furthermore, the app proposes specific channels for the event’ topic and session and
give attendees the chance to contribute to other participants’ experience with sessions
and people recommendations. Attendees can create their own agenda and access
speakers, exhibitors and sponsors’ profiles as well as interactive maps and event
materials such documents and videos. Of course, DoubleDatch enables many features
also for the organizers who are able to create social wall with the event phots and posts.
On top of that, they are able to send push notifications and drive the engagement
through promoted posts. DoubleDatch offers beacons integrations too: it means
attendees are going to receive location based messages about updates and other relevant
information.
Guidebook98 is focused on easing the app building process: it offers a drag and drop
system which makes everything really intuitive and simple for the organizers. As its
competitors, it offers a news feed, following Facebook style, where all the information
are streamed. Attendees can receive push notifications with the relevant updates and
provide real-time feedbacks in order to enable the organizers to apply the needed
adjustments. Of course, organizers can sell the space on their apps: banners and other
sponsorships related opportunities are enable. The app is thought to embrace up-to-the-
minute changes enabling modifications to schedules, maps and speaker list. In addition,
Guidebook offers to the organizers remote access to the event management
functionalities, powerful analytics, team access to the app and a true eased user
interface for the app building process.
A2z99 is the app provider of ChirpE. It is a fast and intuitive apps offering real-time
updates and planning functionalities. Users can connect with other attendants
empowering network building opportunities. Unfortunately, the support offered is just
by email which is not coherent with the promptness and real-time nature of an event.
For the sponsors, ChirpE provides pre-event visibility and a tool for extend their own
reach that can go beyond and be more intimate towards event participants. Through its
app, a2z is able to offer analytics that can result in an in-depth ROI analysis helping
companies to validate if the investment they did had positive consequences. ChirpE
provides the event managers with a centralized data access integrated with the most
popular social medias platform integrations and additional digital platforms for
sponsoring opportunities.
97
DoubleDatch, http://doubledutch.me/product/event-app/, July, 2016
98
Guidebook, https://guidebook.com/event-apps/, July, 2016
99
A2z, http://www.a2zinc.net/Show6/public/Content216.aspx, July, 2016
36
As we can observe, these are all apps that allow organizer to offer a customized version
of an event app but this lead us to this question: “Why would the attendants not delete
the app after the end of event?”. The app reviews provided does not seem to provide
valid arguments to answer this question. By contrast, a closer look at the information
gathered indicates that these apps do not seem to provide any additional value to their
users or at least an additional value that exceeds the event itself. While these apps can
support both attendees and organizers in living and providing a better experience in a
tradeshow, conference, fair or corporate meetings, they struggle to follow up the event
with a further commitment regarding users’ needs. Attendees who participate to an
event do not want the attendants’ benefits to end with the event itself likewise the
organizers miss out incredible opportunities to engage customers and strengthen the
relationship with them.
b. Design Week’s apps analysis
We had a look at general app providers but in order to make our analysis more complete
we would like to further examine mobile apps created for design events. Of course, we
came across several apps but we wanted the analysis to be as much meaningful as
possible. Indeed, since we decided to focus on the Italian design industry, we reviewed
the apps that have been developed for the most important Italian design events, a fair
that is recognized as the most important worldwide design 100 : “The Salone
Internazionale del Mobile”, also known as “Design Week”. Although, it can seem to be
limited to the furniture industry the Design Week has always been the cradle for
trends 101 that have been transposed in other fields such as fashion, automotive and
architecture. The fair was born in 1961 but only in 1994 saw its acclamation when the
German fair, which had been created one year before the Italian one, the “Koelnmesse”,
comparing the two events result declared the Italian fair as first in the world102. Today,
the Design Week is really different from its early editions: suffice to say the last edition
in April saw three hundred and seventy thousand people and 67% of them were coming
from foreign countries.
The Design week is a great visibility opportunity, for this reason many brands,
newspapers and organization attempt to take the scene. In fact, we can observe that
there are magazines’ Design Weeks apps such as “Interni”103 and “Elle”, two Italian
magazines that offer their own app. We excluded them from our analysis because we
aimed at analysing the official ones. Therefore, we took into account “Salone del
Mobile.Milano 2016” 104 and “Fuorisalone” 105 developed by the organizations that
handle, respectively, the Design Week organization and the Fuori Salone one (it is a
spontaneous event made of hundreds of exhibitions around the Milan’s Design Districts
by design companies but also fashion, automotive and technology ones join it).
100
Daviso, N., “What to look out for at Milan’s Salone del Mobile in 2016”, Financial Times, April, 2016
101
Editorial, “10 Things We’re Looking Forward to at This Year’s Salone del Mobile”,
http://www.sightunseen.com/2016/03/salone-top-10/, Sight Unseen, March, 2016
102
Editorial, “Salone del Mobile 2015”, http://blog.ballarini-interni.com/eventi/salone-del-mobile-2015/, Interni, April,
2015
103
Interni, https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/interni-fuorisalone-2016/id355707488?mt=8, Itunes, July, 2016
104
Salone del Mobile, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salone-del-mobile.milano-
2016/id1098568482?l=it&ls=1&mt=8, Itunes, July, 2016
105
Fuorisalone, https://itunes.apple.com/it/app/fuorisalone-2016/id978063452?mt=8,Itunes,
37
“Salone del Mobile.Milano 2016” has been developed by Tinext a Swiss technology
company. It is not even a classic event app: it is just a hybrid between a web-app and
an old-style event app. Once you open it, it does not even require a user registration,
meaning that the event organizers are missing both a data gathering and an
engagement opportunity. In the Appendix D106, we can examine the homepage: there is
no Menu and the various icons are nothing but links which connect with web pages as
we are going to show in Appendix E, F, G and H, which corresponds to the map (which
is not event interactive, just a pdf), the schedule, the catalogue (which is not even mobile
responsive) and the ticket (in this section they did not even care about removing the
cookie bar. The app is not absolutely user friendly and, above all, it is only in Italian.
This app is just a digitalized version of the “Salone del Mobile” website, there is not a
meaningful interaction but just a navigation among links which do not provide any
additional value since everyone could just google the same information without
undertaking phone memory issue. As we can see from the rates on both stores, iTunes
store and Google Play store, the users agree with our point of view- see Appendix J and
I. The app is rated on the Apple’s store 3 stars and on the Android’s store 2,1 and the
comments complain about the continuous crashes and bugs, the lack of app maps,
friendly user experience and interactivity – see Appendix K.
“Fuorisalone” app is a real app and not a hybrid or a web-app. The app offers the
possibility to register through the social media integration with both Facebook and
Twitter (see Appendix L): the app provider gains a double advantage because users do
not need to enter their personal data and the system accesses their social media
information (interests, shared friendships and so on). “Fuorisalone” has a Menu which
ease the navigation (see Appendix M) and is divided in less sections contrary to the
“Salone del Mobile.Milano 2016” app (see Appendix N, O and P). In the Appendix, we
included the schedule and the event search engine. In fact, it is possible to search by
day, by industry related to the event and by “open party” (events open to everyone
promoted by the main brands) what we are interested in. The other two sections, “My
Agenda” and “Design Districts” are not available throughout the year: the first gives the
opportunity to create your own agenda but with many crasher and inconsistencies and
the latter provides detailed information about the various Milan’s Design Districts.
Compared to the “Salone del Mobile.Milano 2016” app, this app has slight better
improvements and this is also mirrored by the rates which is 2,5 stars on the Apple’s
store and 3,2 on the Android’s one (see Appendix Q and R). Nevertheless, users still
complain about a slow app with several bugs in the sections and in the social media
integrations, some users complain even about some buttons which do not work. At least,
we have noticed the app developer company is interested about users’ feedbacks and
answers them on the store.
We are confident this is not the best that can be offered to the Design Week attendants.
We wonder how can it be possible that an app that can possibly be used by three hundred
thousand people is not tested before: our answer is that organizers do not care about the
event mobile applications and undervalue the potential embodied in its value. With this
in mind we formulated the value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis.
c. Value creation and growth hypothesis
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Iphone Screenshots, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/salone-del-mobile.milano-
2016/id1098568482?l=it&ls=1&mt=8, iTunes, July, 2016
38
We have analysed the existing solutions landscape for the Design Week participants
who are interested in living their event experience in a facilitated and smarter way. The
available solutions seem to be poor and weaken on the technological side too. For this
reason, we formulated our value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis:
“We believe design events attendants are looking for a mobile solution which is more
tailored upon their specific needs and requirements particularly related to the design
environment and they are going to involve their peers because one of the events goals is
create connections among people”.
Our statements include both hypothesises which we are going to test through the
interviews questions. Of course, we are going to test if our beliefs are coherent with the
reality. Based on the interviews result we are going to draw our recommendations about
which can be the managerial implications of our findings.
d. Interviews
We reviewed which are the current possibilities for organizers who want to avail
themselves of mobile event app and we have examined the solutions offered by one of
the most important design event in the world, the Design Week. With this in mind, we
have formulated our value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis which we are now
going to test with the interviews. As we have previously hinted, we selected three
categories of event design attendants: design students, design professionals and design
academics.
Concerning the first category, we found four profiles. Four female design students aged
between 22 and 30 years old. Three of them are Taiwanese and one is from U.S., they
are all currently studying in Milan and usually attend design events in the city. Apart
from the younger one, Yu-Chin Chang, the others have experiences in their background:
Chan Ya Ju is an industrial design, Araminta David is a food design and Yuan Tsai
Feng is a gallerist. The professionals come from prestigious design studios in Milan and
worldwide. We have reached to involve three Matheo Thun & Partners107’ designers, the
design studio is one of most famous in Milan and has also an office in Shanghai. In
particular, we could interview Elena Pelosi, Matheo Thun Art Director and Head of
Communication Department, Benedetto Fasciana, Matheo Thun Art Creative Director,
and Bettina Migge, one of the two Matheo Thun Product Design. They annually
participate as exhibitors to the Design Week, other events around the world – such as
Miami Design Week, and organize events themselves. In addition, we managed to
interview Aleks Tatic, the founder of Tatic Designstudio108. Aleks Tatic is a Red Dot109
jury member and annually takes part to several design events such awards, exhibitions
and of course the Design Week. The design academics we interviewed conferred further
value to their contributions. Indeed, we contacted the Director of “Accademia di Belle
Arti di Brera”, a worldwide famous institution where famous painter and sculptor
taught, and two professors from Design Department of “Politecnico di Milano”. One of
107
Matheo Thun, http://www.matteothun.com/page/72/team, July, 2016
108
Tatic Designstudio, http://www.taticdesignstudio.com/#!about/c1enr, July, 2016
109
Red Dot, http://en.red-dot.org/about-us.html, July, 2016
39
them is Luca Fois, who actively contribute to the success of Design Week transforming
this event as we know today.
In order to test if our value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis were true, these
are the questions we have asked to the selected profiles:
1) Which has been the last design event you have attended?
2) Did the organizers of this event provide you with a dedicated mobile app?
3) How an app could impact the way you live an event and how it could have impacted
this event?
4) Which can be the most important contribution that a mobile app can give to a design
event?
5) In an ideal world, if you would have to develop a design event app, which feature your
ideal app would not lack?
We could not ask more questions because by exaggerating their number the profiles
would have been nervous or annoyed and they would have given just the answers that
the interviewer wanted to hear in order to end the interview as soon as possible. We
have asked which events they take part in and which has been the last one they
attended to have an idea of which events usually are more popular. Therefore, we have
further investigated if they had any previous experiences about mobile event apps.
Then, we have asked if they did believe in the contribution that technology can provide
to design events. Finally, we have tried to inspire their imagination in order to figure
out what they would find interesting and which were the main lacks in their opinion.
From the interviews we can see that people are familiar with app usage and find a value
in the contribution that this technological tool can provide them. Of course, there are
some critical point of view, such as the Accademia di Brera Director’s one, which doubt
if the apps, and the technology overall, is distancing people rather than bringing them
closer. We reported the integral interviews.
Yu-Chin Chang – Design student - 07/07/2016

G: I’d like to understand events design attendees’ needs in order to improve their
experience. The aim is to provide a useful tool that can help both organizers and
attendees to live a better experience at the event, whether it is a big one like “Salone
del Mobile” or smaller ones like open studio, fair and exhibit.
Y.C.: yeah applications are a convenient tool to organize events attendance. As of now
I’m using Facebook and its feature that allows to be linked to similar events once you
show interest or participate to a particular one.
G: Apps can also enable network building and enhancing possibilities. On top of that
app can be used to showcase products created by the designers and manufacturers. Apps
can be a nicer way to promote products because they can create direct connections with
people that love, study and work within design and can give them useful insights to
designers and manufacturers.
Y.C.: I fully agree.
1) G: Which was the last design events that you attended?
40
Y.C.: Design week
2) G: Was there an app developed for the participants? Did you download it?
Y.C.: yes, there was an app but I did not download it because I searched on google and
there was the design week website which had similar functions. Additionally, the
website itself was very handy so I was enough comfortable with it. It was easier for me
to google what I was looking for rather than download the app and look up there.
3) G: which feature do you think the design week app could have provided to
the attendees to make the event easier to be experienced and lived? If you did
not download it, which features you would have included in this app?
YC: ok, so they should have included a calendar easier to navigate, the user experience
could have been better designed. It is really difficult to know where the coolest events
are. Of course, cool has a subjective meaning but what I mean is that every time I’m
sure that something incredible will go on but it is frustrating to find places and locations
and I barely manage to do it.
YC: I know it is difficult to gather this amount of information in one place only but it’s
too chance dependent if one can manage to attend the events he or she cares about. As
I said the only way I managed to attend events I was interested about was by chance
because some of my Facebook friend put a like on determined events and consequently
they appear to my wall as well. From the one I’ve liked myself, I have been linked to
others, like a chain. In this way I reached to manage my time and organize my
attendance to the Design Week.
G: so as of now, Does Facebook represent the most effective way to be connected to the
Design ecosystem?
YC: I think… Yes. In Milan, yes
G: why only in Milan? Is in Taiwan different?
YC: No, but I’ve been in Czech Republic and in Prague there was an incredible website110
managed by the city of Prague: it was very detailed and there were categories I could
not even expect to find. Additionally, it was very complete, there were both big and small
events allowing to be on track without missing anything. Additionally, it enables a
customizable experience since a user could personalised the interaction with the events
by choosing the days.
4) G: How do you think an app can improve the experience of someone
attending a design events? Which are the aspect of an app design events
related you care the most?
YC: I wish the app would be able to let me know very fast which kind of events could
attract me. Of course, if I am not going to use google and Facebook, this app has to
substitute their functions: short descriptions are welcomed as well the possibility to
create a tailor-made list of favourite designers and style that influence the events
showed on the app. Additionally, information like what it is the event about, who is
110
Prague Events, http://www.prague.eu/en/events, July, 2016
41
going to be there and if there are going to be free drinks and other benefits would be
nice to have.
5) G: which aspects of a design events can be affected the most by an app?
YC: it would be nice to know more about the people who have organized the events, such
as designers or particular design brands. For example, it would be nice to navigate
within their portfolio in order to know more about them before the events. Basically, I
do not download so many apps because of lack of space on the memory so I should know
before why I need this app, why can’t I just google what I need?
G: what could convince you to download such app?
YC: so in order to draw my interest it should be easy to integrate with other work and
travel related app since these are the categories I download the most.
G: then, do you think could be interesting for this app to be linked with what is going
on in other cities related to design?
YC: No I don’t think it has to be necessary. It would be enough to be updated about
design events in the city, getting push notifications and information about new events
YC: If I can give you a suggestion, it would be really cool if this app could foster network
building opportunity. Since it is about events which are local activities, this app could
really help local design to know each other. I know a city like Milan is full of designers
but it is hard to get in touch with them
****
Chan Ya Ju, Araminta David, Yuan Tsai Feng – Design students - 08/07/2016
1) G: Which has been the last design event you have attended? The event size
does not matter because we believe in a scalable product that can fit different
events size needs.
CYJ: I attended a small exhibition and the Design Week
YTF: I have been at Hangar Bicocca111 (a design exhibition within a university campus)
D: a small exhibit about bicycle
2) G: Did the organizers of this event provide you with a dedicated mobile app?
D: No
CYJ: No
YTF: No
3) G: Do you really think that an app can help designers change the way the
live events and how they live the design experience?
D: Yes, for sure.
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Pirelli HangarBicocca, http://www.hangarbicocca.org/en/, July, 2016
42
CYJ: Absolutely yes
YTF: Yeah, I fully agree
4) G: If you would have to choose an aspect that technology on which
technology could have its biggest impact, which would it be?
D: The exposure. It is hard to collect information about events. Especially in Milan,
there are so many events happening that it can be overwhelming… you do not know
where you should go, which event is the best one or any related information. One can
get to the point of attending none of them because he or she does not want to choose. So
the power of an app can be in provide information in a better way to help people choose
more consciously. As well, the app would have to help designer to promote their events:
if I want people to see what I am doing the app should provide a way to raise designers
voice because sometimes can really be hard advertising a small event.
CYJ: For me it is more about arrangement: I would like to have some tool that could
affect the attendants number and attendants form. The event can become overcrowded
and generate safety issue so I would appreciate to be able to communicate it or to limit
the participants number and make the event more exclusive. It has happened to me
many times that the events reached full capacity and I could not get in. I’d like to know
before the attendants’ number and manage the people flow through the app.
YTF: I would be interested in the exposure too. I have been in Paris and there are a lot
of exhibits too but if you are not from Paris it is almost impossible for you to be aware
about it. With an app, I would haven’t had this problem. I think my colleague agree with
me about our preference concerning local designers and events rather than the
mainstream and bigger ones.
5) G: In an ideal world, if you would have to develop your own application,
which features would not miss?
D: you can see all of the events that are happening near you: almost in the tinder way.
You can see if the event is close to you, how much close it is and you can say if it is
interesting for you. You should have different categories and you’d be able to save what
you have searched so later you would be able to find that event you saw earlier. On
Facebook, when I see an events, I show I am interested in it but I forget about it: it could
be nice to have the events easily organized. Moreover, sometimes events are full so I’d
like to know before if there’s or not the chance to be allowed in side or if they reached
the full capacity. User friendliness is a must: people want to find what they are looking
for quickly: I would enable them to search by location and category and give them the
possibility to leave reviews. In this way they will be able to decide if going only to five
star events and see what others think about it. On the other hand, the exhibitors can
learn how to improve their event, what has gone well and what hasn’t. If I can give you
a suggestion you can implement a TripAdvisor business model and make money through
the advertisement. G: Do you mean you would be also able to check the events that
already took place? Would you like to have a sort of history of what has been organized
and where?
D: Yeah, exactly.
43
YTF: My suggestions come from my personal experience: I have been at “The Floating
Piers”112 and I waited in line more than one hour. If there would have been the way to
know the people turnout I would have been able to plan better my visit. Additionally, I
see this app as an opportunity for knowledge sharing, I’d like to be in contact with the
famous people attending the event. CYJ: In my opinion, I would like the app to be
organized according to the different design styles. As of now, I’m using Facebook to
attend the events and be updated about them but is very messy. Of course, the user
should be able to follow that category in order to be updated about it and these events
could be displayed on a map in order to understand by the colour which belongs to a
certain category. Moreover, it is very important for me to know as much information as
possible about the artist and about the event that has been organized.
D: of course everything must be multilingual. Because the apps I’ve been using are all
in Italian.
CYJ: We also believe once you enable all these possibilities to the users, the app is going
to become a trend and you can leverage the databases of contacts you have built
****
Benedetto Fasciana, Bettina Migge – Design Professional – 12/07/2016
1) G: Which has been the last design event you have attended?
M: design week
F: Design week where we presented some of our products. At Matheo Thun we work on
different design product types from the industrial design to a type of design thought to
promote and restore the Italian craftsmanship excellences. Bettina takes care about
industrial design department while I handle the department dedicated to restoring and
promoting Italian craftsmanship excellences design related.
2) G: Did the organizer provided you with an app?
F: yes, there was the Interni one, we attended the Fuorisalone (collateral events
connected to the main ones but at different time and in different locations) so we
organized a showcase and we were included in the guide included in the Interni app.
3) G: From which app features have you been satisfied the most? From which
one have you been disappointed the most?
F: I finally ended up not using it for lack of time reasons.
M: I download design events apps connected to the events I am attending but I did not
use them. I just take a look at them to have an idea but during these events for people
who organize them or have to participate as a brand there are so many things to do that
one is always out of time
M: I usually understand if an app is well made if I do not have to look for anything but
its user interface proposes me already what I need. On the other hand, when I am
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The Floating Piers, http://www.thefloatingpiers.com/home#introduction, July, 2016
44
supposed to use it I could also be in the crowd or in area with low or no signal. If I use
an app everything has to work instantly and intuitively:
4) G: Do you believe an application can improve or change the approach and
the experience related to the way you live a design events?
F: yeah, definitely. There are already a lot of apps. Imagine we still receive a lot of
invitation through emails or via classic mail and we have to create our own schedule
programme to match the events we aim to attend with our available time. Better
planning functions that could allow to customize more precisely the kind of attendance
we aim to pursuit would be really useful.
M: sure, paper invitations are still really common because they are more targeted and
personalized. Of course, they are combined with email remainder but at a certain level
they show a different degree of attention towards various stakeholders such buyers,
press and media in general. According to the target you aim at acquiring, the paper
invitation has still its importance above all within a certain environment.
F: imagine when you are the chief editorialist or an important buyer you receive
hundreds of email daily, while the paper invitation is remembered and appreciated
more. A paper invitation probably stays on your work desk and is remembered easily.
5) G: If you would create a design event app, which would be the features that
could not miss?
F: it would be great for me to use it to skip the line by giving me privileged access or a
particular time slots that guarantee me to avoid the queue. An app that could manage
better from the organizational point of view the attendance and the attendees would
really fit my needs. Of course it is a problem limited to mass events while there are the
invitation-only ones that are more intimate.
M: additionally, it would be really useful to have a wallet, like the flight ticket one
created by apple, to collect the business cards: something to match faces with business
cards. Having an address book of the people with who one has interacted at the events
would really be useful.
****
Elena Pelosi – Design professional – 12/07/2016
1) G: Which is the last design event you took part in?
EP: the “salone del mobile”.
2) G: Did the organizers of this event make an app available?
EP: There were many, in particular the internal ones, those from Brera Design District,
and something else. There was also the official app of the event.
3) G: Which are the functions of the apps that has satisfied you the most?
EP: The one I found more useful is the agenda with the geo-localization. This function
in fact help you to organize your time: people never have time to do so, therefore it is
45
very useful to have something like a planning which has already been done for you. A
function that allows you to save the events that you prefer and in which you would like
to take part would also be very useful, in order to have your own customized agenda. I
used, in fact, to look at the general agenda and then I noted down day by day where do
I wanted to go according to the itinerary and the time I had. If we use as an example in
the Design Week, we see that the area in which this event takes place is very vast
nowadays: as a consequence, while in the past it was sufficient to go around from zone
A, to zone B and C, nowadays the locations were many and different one from the other.
Therefore, for example, if you wanted to go seeing the Nike, you have to organize if you
wanted to go visiting exhibitions farther.
F: if you consider, moreover, that during the event week it is very difficult to find a taxi,
it is easy to understand how important is to organize your agenda and your movements.
EP: To make another example, I have been also to Artbazel in Miami, and there the
event was very well organized, probably also do to the fact that it is a smaller event,
focusing only on art. There were also private events, to whom you have to register in
order to have the access. As I said before, it is a smaller event than Design Week, so I
realize that probably the main difficulties, that characterize the latter, derive from this
aspect. During the Design Week, the problem is that you can find a bit of everything:
there is also who comes up to be a designer and exhibit its pieces under its own house
whit the flag (Figure 13), also with the flags that do not function anymore (I do not look
anymore at them). They are too many.
Figure 13 – The Flag

F: It is a trend nowadays to exploit the Design Week, which has a very big business
around, to get publicity and visibility. There are also many events related to fashion.
EP: also to car-fashion, for example.
F: At this point, this event has begun a mixture of so many different things.
46
4) G: Do you believe an app can change the way you live a design event?
EP: Well, it definitely helps you living the event in a more relaxed way. It can surely
help a lot. Then it is up to you how to use it. On the basis of how much time you have,
you can make a more accurate selection. It is much like when you go on a trip, let’s say
to Cambodia. It is very different if you travel there only with the lonely planet guide in
your hands, or if you do so after having collected information for one month. Of course,
if you do not have time, you will choose the first option, but it will show you only the
most common and touristic locations.
Therefore, I think that the biggest problem for an app would be the risk to show you the
most common and commercial thing, those belonging to who pays the most. That is the
reason why I said before that, in my opinion, the most useful function would be to have
an app that allows you to create your own customize agenda.
5) G: In an ideal world, if you would have to develop a mobile app for a design
event, which feature would not miss?
EP: Surely the possibility I mentioned to create and customize your own agenda,
starting from the general one that has already been prepared on the app and
synchronizing it whit the calendar and the related alarms. Of course there are already
many apps in which you can put the address and that tell you how to reach the place
and how much time it requires.
So I think that if one uses the potentialities that a smartphone already has, one can
really manage to see more of the event. Then, for example, it would also be very useful
to have the possibility of saving the photos related to each location, with also some vocal
notes, in order to build an historic memory and avoid that, after having been all around
for many days taking many different photos, you then are not very sure of the location
from which you took the photo (it is true that on the phone library the address in which
you took the photo appears, but it is only the name of a street, whereas it could be very
useful, for example, to register vocal notes.
****
Aleks Tatic – Design professional – 16/07/2016
1) G: Which events design do you usually attend?
T: Design week or special events such like “Triennale of Design” and I’m also part of
RED Dot jury so I always take part to the award ceremony. As well as IF Design award
in Munich and the German design award in Frankfurt.
2) G: Did the organizer of the design events you generally attend provide you
with events app?
T: yes, generally they do it
3) G: which of these app features did impress you the most?
T: design week provide several apps, Interni ones and Fuorisalone. I usually use both of
them and I use them intensively
47
G: in your opinion which of their features work better?
T: I use them replacing a paper guide: I check the event of the day, there’s a map, they
give you details about the exhibits and so on.
G: in your opinion can an app change the way the attendees experience the design event?
T: Yeah for sure
4) G: Which can be the design event aspect that can be influenced and changed
the most?
T: you can have access to a lot of information in a comfortable and convenient way living
the event without tons of paper materials. The app could also profile the users and send
information that could be interested for the different users’ profiles. Unfortunately, the
app I’ve seen so far are just a digitalized version of the paper guides they are not smart
as I would expect.
G: In your opinion what the apps are missing to be able to give to design professionals
a concrete contribution in the way you approach the event and you pursue your own
events’ goals and interest?
T: They are missing a user centred approach. They do not design the app according to
users’ needs and miss the potential utility that these apps could give to professionals.
There’s not a commitment in understanding which are the attendees needs and
requirements. The apps are design with a cost saving approach.
5) G: In an ideal world if you would have to design a design event app, which
feature your ideal app would not lack?
T: well, each design event has its own needs. We can see design events concentrated in
one place only or located in different places around the city, such as Design Week. In
events like this it is really important to be aware of the various exhibit: I would say that
the provided map should be design better suggesting design itineraries according to
different design styles. I would let the users the possibility to customize these itineraries
according to their needs and preferences. In events like this it is really important to be
efficient in the way you participate.
****
Franco Marrocco Dir. Accademia di Brera – Design academics – 14/07/2016
M: I have been to one of the event organized by our Accademia
2) G: Did the organizers provide the attendants with a mobile app?
M: No we did not. We did not think it was necessary since it was a really small event.
3) G: How do you think an app can improve the way we live a design event?
48
M: I think an app can help bringing people closer to each other. It has to be the
mean not the purpose. The app has to serve the human being, it does not have to isolate
it.
4) in an ideal world, which feature would not miss in an app developed by you?
M: Managerial tool and communication tool. I would like to have features that can help
me in the handling planning activities concerning the events and in the communication
activities. These are the two of the most time consuming tasks when we deal with event
management.
****
Luca Fois – Design Academic – 20/07/2016
F: I usually attend product design fairs and Technology and Materials related Fairs and
of course the Design Week. The last one I have attended and drawn my attention was
an event concerning the design in the museum of the future. The last one 100% about
design was Design Week in Milan.
F: No, there wasn’t.
3) G: Which do you think can be the event aspect that can be affected the most
by a mobile app?
F: The content aspect because it could have been more available reaching more users
and sharing it in a most effective way. Another aspect could be for sure the dialogue
between all the participant which can be carried on during the event and, above all after
its end.
4) G: Which can be the most important contribution that a mobile app can give
to a design event?
F: An app can help all the stakeholders involved to be more aware of what they are
attending, which can be the opportunities and which is the event’s goal. For design
events’ attendants is really important to customize the experience in order to schedule
and organize the participation in the most effective way. The possibility to continue
relationships, debates and nurture the network create at the events is something that
today is missing and could really help the attendants who attempt to enter in this
ecosystem that is quite exclusive.
F: I think that the condicio sine qua non for every app is the ease of use. Before any
other features, the app must be easy to use, intuitive and as much simple as possible. It
is mandatory to know, in all the apps, where we are, from where we get where and which
are the destinations we can possibly reach.
49
****
Federico Cauro – 20/07/2016
C: I usually attend Design Week events and above all Fuorisalone events. I like to attend
them also because they are a good benchmark to understand which are the main trends
in the design industry and design events one. The last event I have attended that
particularly caught my attention has been Digifest in Toronto.
C: No, it was a traditional event (Paper guide and so on)
3) G: how an app could impact the way you live an event and how it could have
impacted this event?
C: An app can help to better organize attendees’ time and when there are many sub-
events is can give its contribution in make everything clearer. Moreover, a digital tool
is more emotional than a simple sheet of paper so can support in delivering the
organization brand values. If we take into account also the follow-up needs typical of
any event, the app can provide an effective tool to extend the experience beyond the
duration of the event itself.
4) G: Which can be the most important contribution that a mobile app can give
to a design event?
C: On one hand, it can give value to the attendants giving them the possibility to
continue their experience throughout the year with follow-up and community related
features in order to enable them to increase their network which is generally highly
appreciated. An app can make the events more emotional and manage the event
experience with a more conscious approach. On the other hand, it can help organizers
to lower the costs and above all get feedback about what has been organized which is
one of the most important thing. Organizers can know who has gone where, how, how
attendants where interested in an event, how the event went from the networking point
of view. The data will be already categorized and this information can be an additional
value for the organizers who can access first-hand information at a low cost: they will
know where do they have to improve, what they have to change and why.
C: The possibility to post something about the event and share this impression with the
other participants and a full set of analytics concerning all the most important metrics:
how many people are in the event, which sub-events are they attending and so on both
qualitative and quantitative data.
VIII. Results from data analysis

a. Results from mobile event app landscape analysis
50
As we can observe from the analysis that has been undertaken, the app providers who
develop mobile events apps are struggling to find a suitable formula. This is highlighted
by the rates on the stores that are a proper benchmarking to understand if a technology
solution is addressing correctly determined issues, by the insights that resulted from
the interviews and by the absence of a market leader in in this industry. We have
observed a crowd environment where the current actors are attempting at offering
always the most fashioned solutions. The app providers are indeed chasing the latest
trend concerning the technology, such as augmented reality and virtual reality,
underestimating the evolution of the users’ needs. Therefore, this situation is causing
an overwhelming overcrowding which confuse the event organizers when they have to
choose the proper tool.
The decision of which technology solution has to be adopted is increasing in its
importance in the organization context involving always more important part of the
organization because more executives are embracing the importance of the events and
the benefits that they can provide. Nevertheless, the differentiations of each mobile
solutions and the effects that the different set of features can perform are not clear and
not well communicated. By reviewing the various app providers, we have noticed that
their communication lack of evidence related results. As already mentioned, each of
them attempt at improving their communication activities trying to reach the event
management insiders with publications related to the industry where their solution is
advertised as the best one trying to support this statement with arguable proofs. On
their websites, which represents the main advertisement tool their value proposition
clearly stated meaning that the event planners are often taking their decisions
according to the price or trusting peers’ opinions which is by far the most trusted
benchmark. Through the analysis we pursued, we demonstrated how similar are the
offerings of the different app providers that have been selected: the features do not differ
between the apps and there is a serious lack concerning what happen before and
after the event. These apps focus only on the event itself missing out a great opportunity
represented by two likewise important event part: the period before the event and the
period after. Concerning these two phases, the event attendants and event organizers
are devoid of a connection with the event itself and with all the stakeholders of the
event. A specific concern regards the network opportunity that these app providers are
missing: as we are saw from the interviews, attendants are interested in entering the
world that there is behind an event and currently there is not a solution that are
answering to this specific needs. Additionally, app providers do not see an even more
important possibility: creating a community. The event attendants are part of a tribe,
they are all bonded together by the interest concerning what it is the event about, who
organized it and why it has been organized. The event is a one-shot activity, it has a
beginning and an end but what can be created around has not necessary to have defined
space and time borders. Furthermore, another community that can be nurtured can be
the event organizers one. Within a field where there is not or there is poor
differentiation, the different is made by the details and by affection and loyalty of the
customers. The event app providers lack the attention toward customers that have low
barriers to change supplier given the similar offerings distributed in the market.
Finally, although we understand it is a strategic decision, it is a superficial and
51
pretentious assumption believing that the available solutions can be valid answers to
the different and physiological needs perceived in each industry. We find hard to believe
to a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Each industry and, subsequently, each event has its own
typical characteristics producing specific problems which need specific solutions.
b. Findings from dedicated event design apps
We have talked about the customizable solution offered in the market by the app
providers but the analysis concerning the mobile solution offered specifically for design
events, in particular for one of the most important design event, if not the most
important one, is likewise worrying. The available products are not even performing as
basic events app: searching and scheduling activities are chaotic and tiring. Users
complain about continuous bugs and crashes which prevent the apps usage. In
particular, the official app sponsored on the Design Week website 113 cannot be
categorized as an app: it is collection of web link which heavily slow down the
navigation. Indeed, users do not download these apps and prefer to google their
information. As a result, the attendance results frustrating and stressful because
participants have to quickly plan where to go and are so overwhelmed by the number of
events proposed that someone don’t even attend any of them. The selection of the events
that the participants want to attend is really annoying and it is almost impossible for
them to customize their experience according to their specific needs and interests. The
connection between participant is not stimulated and cannot simply happen since the
app do not offer this feature. Furthermore, attendants cannot even connect with the
exhibitors: an incredible number of engagement opportunities are wasted right when a
brand can meet its stakeholders from all over the world in a dedicated and intimate
environment. The users themselves are disappointed by the apps and complain about
the missed opportunities. Finally, the city itself is missing an opportunity to promote
its image, landmarks and the businesses generally related to tourism and hospitality.
Although the Design Week is one of the most important design events in the world, the
design industry has a fast innovation development pace. New Design Weeks were born
in Miami and above all Shanghai: we are witnessing a shift in the economy
centralization which is bringing us to an Asia-centric economy in the bulk of the
industries. Milan Design week has to keep up with the competition and can already take
advantage of a considerable attendants’ base which could be exploited with the
technology’s support.
c. Interviews Insights
We have delved into users’ considerations through five questions that we have used to
understand if our value creation hypothesis and growth hypothesis were aligned with
how the target profiles were conceiving the relation between design related events,
technology and their needs. Of course, human beings are led by survival instinct indeed
since the technology and design ecosystem do not provide them with a suitable solution
they combine the available tools to come as close as possible to their needs satisfaction.
We have seen they are familiar with technology usage related to experiencing in a more
complete way the event. They use the existing platform such as the social media ones –
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Facebook in particular has a particular function which displays events related to a
specific topic once a user has showed its interest concerning that particular topic –,
search engines and ask to their friends, besides the traditional methods. When they
use the available app, they find really hard to navigate the information meaning that
they end up shutting the app to find easier and more intuitive way to find the needed
information due also to a lack of time.
As we have seen for the design professionals, time is a precious resource that through
the app could be saved and optimized but this is not what is happening: professionals
do not even download it because they are too busy to manage their own exhibition or
understand how to organize their own attendance to the event they want to participate
to: exactly what a design event app could help them to do. Our findings mirror the users’
disaffection towards what it is seen as a showcase, a superficial digitalization of the
paper guide. Although scheduling and planning activities became a commodity feature,
as we have seen in the most rated app providers’ analysis, the available apps conceived
for the events attended by the majority of the interviewed were not providing it or it
was not properly working. The customization need is share by all the profiles
interviewed and concern various aspect: the schedule, the itineraries and the
information itself. Some targets are worried about the goodness of the information that
could be shared on the app and would like to take their own notes also vocal ones in
order to personalized the experience as much as possible. As of now, the app market is
really competitive and the consumers are always more demanding: they want
integrations with existing platform they daily use mobile phone and are careful towards
phone memory issue. We are witnessing a fast consumers’ evolution with which the
digital product suppliers have to keep up. Users are aware of existing pattern: they want
to be able to share what they are doing at the event, share the knowledge learned and
interact about this knowledge. Apps are seen as a tool to fasten the knowledge sharing:
the content streamed at the event can be accessible by everyone at the same time and
does not require any additional cost. If users now attend a specific event want to know
as much information as possible about the event itself, the designer and the events’
characteristics: they expect to find in the app the awaited attendance flow, the best time
to visit it, the event, who from their network is going to be there and if there will be food
or drink. The needs are becoming always more related to the events feature and the
users are waiting for answers. Both professionals and students claim exclusive
treatments with regards to the way the live the experience: especially in the design field,
an exhibition is a contemplative moment where it is possible to be connected with
products, materials and what there is behind them. A mobile solution that can answer
to these specifics need would be a mobile solution who embrace the user perspective and
embody the users’ expectations.
We have talked about consumers’ evolution but, as we have showed in particular in one
design professional interview (See page 42, Beatrice Migge answers to question 4), there
are some traditional habit who are resisting to change, these are further opportunities
for the app which today are able to combine online and offline component: it could be a
perfect entry point to bring people on the app. Moreover, on the organizers side planners
are likewise aware of the endless possibilities offered by technology and we know that
when consumers know the can have more, they want more. The apps are seen as the
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perfect tool to do something that before was really to pursue towards an event: evaluate
it. They can have real time feedback from them because there is a continuous connection
between the organizers and the participants. The feedbacks are seen under different
point of view not only intended in the classical feedbacks’ meaning, such as review or
opinion. In fact, organizers acknowledge the importance of app as analytic tool that can
give them the most precise event metrics giving a full overview and control of the event.
Finally, surely the less surprising answers have been the one related to the connection
that can be established to the network of participants. As anticipated, we believe app
providers are overlooking the event phases before and after the event itself but they are
also missing out the opportunity to create a network among the participants, which can
have different function according to the event nature and scope: education events can
have knowledge and content sharing purpose regards the network that attends the
event, while fair and exhibitions can have more business oriented network features. Yet,
the network is one of the most valuable benefit that the interviewed acknowledged
under different point of view: interacting with the network during the event asking
questions and sharing ideas, increase personal network collecting in a smarter way the
contacts gained, exploit the network to access an exclusive ecosystem – such as the
design one – sharing with the network the personal portfolio and finally, yet
importantly, increase the personal network through a tool that ensures a continuous
contact with the insiders.
The results collected show the truthfulness of our hypothesis. We have stated that:
“We believe design events attendants are looking for a mobile solution which is more
tailored upon their specific needs and requirements particularly related to the design
environment and they are going to involve their peers because one of the events goals is
create connections among people”.
The target profiles selected confirmed they are feeling the lack of user centred solutions.
The available products attempt to address general needs related to an event experience
and do not focus on the specific needs relevant for the stakeholders of a particular
industry. The customization is increasingly becoming a feature that is taken for
granted: users want to personalize their own experience according to their own goals
and they expect to be provided with a tool that can support them in this task. From the
users’ behaviour described through the interviews, we have learned how they have been
influenced by existing technology tools such as search engines, instant messaging
services and social medias platforms. These technological services have defined usage
patterns concerning the mobile apps and the users became used to interact among each
other through the functionalities offered by these services which are now considered
almost as commodity features. Finally, one of the most interesting insight has been the
tendency to consider an ideal app for design events as a networking tool able to increase
the connections among the users. People see technology as a further tool to increase the
communication enabling job and personal growth opportunities through a seamless,
ubiquitous and eased interaction. Our work provides a tangible baseline for future
entrepreneurs who are willing to explore this field: we opened them a door
demonstrating that the profiles target selected are not only interested in more
segmented products than the available ones but they are already attempting tackle the
issues highlighted combining the usage of different existing service. The next questions
54
and consequent hypothesises could concern what they are willing to pay for besides
further examination of which could be the usage of the app during the whole year.
IX. Relevant implications and findings
a. Contribution to the existing literature

The academic literature does not offer currently sufficient researches on the topic that
we have examined. From the academic point of view, the literature describes the
increasing potential that the event is gaining among the marketing mix component due
to the influence is having on relationship marketing and experiential marketing fields.
We have tried to further provide similar contributions along this line of though. As we
showed from our research, the data collected proved how within the business context
events are being reconsidered. Indeed, the quantitative researches that have been found
proved the rising popularity that events are gaining within corporate environments. We
witnessed a considerable distance between the literature and the business since in the
academic context the event subject is understated and we recorded a lack of studies
about its potential. The literature often acknowledges the importance of the engagement
with the stakeholders. Indeed, engagement bring the relationship with customers,
suppliers and any other entity involved in the company ecosystem to higher level: an
engaged stakeholder cares differently about the company and has a different perception
about it. We have showed how events can contribute to this dimension. It is more and
more challenging create engagement because the ecosystem in which organizations act
is becoming progressively more competitive and demanding. Events can contribute to
create differentiation factors and strengthen the bonds with a stakeholder.
As proved by the interviews, events offer a new degree of interaction because provide
an additional value which is the voluntary participation of the attendants: the
interviewed appear to be highly involved in everything that is related to the event. They
are willing to contribute to improve their own experience because they are aware of the
benefits that the event can grant to them. This positive attitude can have really positive
consequences. The available literature emphasises the value experience but overlooks
that the prearranged nature of event can become a powerful tool in the company’s hands
for testing this experience: by being able to plan the interaction with the stakeholder
and design their participation to the event, the marketers have a qualified tool to test
which are the different reactions to different kind of event and the evaluation of this
reaction is more measurable and prompter than the traditional advertisement tool. The
researchers did not investigate yet the benefits that mobile applications can generate
towards the positive effect that events can have on the company performance and this
could be the starting point for future researches. We demonstrated that in the event app
environment, particularly in the design events one, until now event technology has been
implemented in the wrong way. Indeed, organizers have been taken these kind of
decision with cost-saving approach but the data we have collected show that these
decision needs a more accurate approach. The choice of an event technology, a subject
ignored by the available literature, needs to include considerations about an
organization strategy and its long-term and short-term goals. The risks of creating
disaffections among the stakeholder or miscommunicate important organization
component such as the value proposition are high and cannot be underestimated.
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Finally, we encourage further research on another event potential: the co-creation. In
the intimate and defined environment of the event the interaction can lay the
foundation to co-creation activities such as product design or marketing. The close
contact that goes on for the whole event length can result in inspiring insight and
contribution that can derive from the interaction with the stakeholder or from pre-
planned co-creation activities: when people are aware that they are taken in
consideration and acknowledge that they are contributing to design what an
organization produce or how it communicates with the external environment, they feel
to be part of something bigger and are fully engaged because they are contributing to
something.
b. Managerial implications
An app has to provide a clear value to its users and it needs to communicate this value.
This is the statement that has led our research and drives these recommendations.
People have averagely 65 apps on their phone114 so it is necessary to give them reasons
to download a new one. There must be a value that they can only find by downloading
the app and being there, using it. If the targets find easier to google information or
navigate the website rather than using the events app planners have clearly a problem.
The managers that aim at involve their customers have put this in front of their eyes
when they are conceiving a new product. We have witnessed many products which
consumers are not even aware about their existence or do not find useful, as we have
proved in our study.
App developers in the event ecosystem, as also highlighted in the interviews, are
missing a user centred approach. The people that are going to use the product or service
for which a company is spending its resource have to be involved in the product
development and product design because only though their feedbacks the most suitable
solution is going to be the result. The users conceive themselves as the shapers of the
usage experience that they are going to live and the frustration of being ignored and
acknowledging that their needs are neglected in favour of corporate goals or competition
needs can be catastrophic. Indeed, the consumers are addressing their attention to the
services and products that grant them the highest degree of personalisation. We are in
the middle of the mobile era: “The average smartphone user checks his phone 150 times
per day and spends 127 minutes per day using apps”115. This is a massive opportunity
which cannot be wasted in such competitive environment as the business one is
nowadays. In a world where the external opinion is considered as a reliable source of
information, companies have to engage users in different ways in order to get in touch
with them in a more natural way. Events represent an unconventional, as much as
familiar to people, communication mean and managers can exploit the opportunity
provided by this marketing mix component through the modern technology potentials.
The event app can establish an entry point in the relationship that an organization can
create with its stakeholder, it can be the suitable troy horse with which begin to reach
a consumers and keep to build a relation whose results can exceed the limit of the event.
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115
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We have seen in our business ecosystem the power of communities and networks. As we
can see from famous examples such as Reddit, Linux or Facebook: they are all
technological products that have relied on a community, on the network that this
community can create among the members and on the positive effects of this network.
As we said at the beginning of the section I, connecting with other people, looking for
them is an innate human characteristic and mobile app developers which focus on
events, in particular design events, cannot ignore it: as we have seen users adapt
themselves to the circumstances that surround them but app providers are wasting an
opportunity that probably in few years they would not be able to waste any more either
because it will be too late or because others would have already taken it. Our aim was
not only to demonstrate that users would find more useful a product better shaped
around their needs but also investigate how this product could grow, what could cause
and incentive a steady and increasing usage. We believe that a credible answer can lay
in the opportunity that a network can unlock. By keeping alive the community for the
whole year, before and after the event, managers could have access to an incredible
amount of data and could keep in contact an incredible number of people. The
possibilities are various: a designer could show his or her portfolio, a student could find
an internship, the professional could access new business opportunities, a professor
could share easier the findings of his or her research. An app could surely break the
event borders and limits through its ubiquity and grant new personal and professional
growth horizons for its users.
These interviews clearly pointed out that needs drive decisions, the design student who
was complaining about the lack of phone space stated she was used to download only
what could provide her with a clear additional value in her field of interest (travel, work,
messaging). The consumers have become a brutal judge able to recognize if what it has
been offered to them embody a value which is not already available on the market, a
value that they are not already obtaining from someone else. The technology companies
have to come back to the needs: the time of the technological excitement when
consumers were competing among each other to who had the strangest app on the phone
is ended. Nowadays people take care about their phone memory space, the battery and
the phone overall performance. The Consumers are more educated and evolved both
their usage and their needs therefore the companies have to cope with this new
environment. The gap we have referred to in the title can be filled with a thorough
approach towards the understanding of which are the customers’ pains, gains and the
jobs 116 he or she want to be fulfilled. The lean startup is only the beginning, a
methodology that has to be applied to fasten the work and test if our assumptions are
consistent with what the people that are going to pay for our product believe, think and
feel. At the end, it is just about people and a product for people has to be thought with
people.
X. Limitation of the work

The bounds of this research lay over several aspects. First, the research takes into
account only physical events. Virtual events have been excluded by the evaluation that
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57
has been made in spite of the rising importance they are gaining meaning that the
recommendations and the considerations we have pursued do not apply to the virtual
event ecosystem. Additionally, we took into account four different app providers based
on the most rated on the store but we do not exclude the existence of better product who
are not rated by the users. In fact, although the reviews became a habit among digital
product consumers, we are aware that users are more likely to judge an experience when
it was a bad one rather than the opposite. This is caused by our expectations towards
the experience: if the product or service’ experience is below our expectations our
disappointment fuels the bad rating, on the contrary we consider as normal if the
experience was positive and it takes a further effort, which overcome the expectations,
to generate a positive rating. For this reason, it is hard to know if some app providers
have been left out. Additionally, if the apps received few rates, these are not showed in
the stores whether they are positive or negative ones. However, a deep and thorough
research about mobile apps for design event has been undertaken without any
significant results. With regards to this point, the app developers publish the apps
under different developers’ page so it is problematic to track them: sometimes they are
published under other app developers’ domain or under the event organizers’ ones.
Further limitations concern the limited literature reviews available. As indicated by
some authors too, such as Phil Crowther, academics often undervalue the power of
events themselves, let alone the contribution that technology, and in particular mobile
apps, can give to this marketing mix component. The lack of reference points results in
a lack of studies from the academic point of view with regards of the usage, spread and
benefit of the mobile app for the event management field. Moreover, although the
quantitative research methods have been excluded by the research they would have
supported the results founded. Indeed, quantitative researches are suggested in order
to confirm on a larger scale if the insight arose can found to be meaningful for a larger
audience. We aimed at laying the foundations for accurate quantitative research that
will be undertaken with more consciousness thanks to the qualitative contributions that
have been provided. Yet, the impressions we recorded with the interviews would
probably have been even more significant if they could have been recorded throughout
the event we used as benchmark, the Design Week. For this reason, we suggest to
further evolve the research with the help of a sponsor, such as the Design Week
organization who could provide the resources and a close contact with the targets
considered, which has the interest to develop a better designed product for their events.
Finally, we have to acknowledge that even more powerful and meaningful results can
be reached by increasing the number of interview and the topic: user design sessions,
focus groups and other face-to-face interactions can bring to a higher degree this study.
Design schools, design studio and design company could be involved leveraging their
contribution which would also allow to create a customer base of early adopters.
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XII. Appendix
Appendix A – “Event Management” and “Networking” features
61
Appendix B – “Content” and “App Tech Specifications and Support”
features
Appendix C – “Integration” and “Location and Travel” features
62
Appendix D – “Homepage” screenshot
63
Appendix E – “Map” screenshot
64
Appendix F – “Schedule” screenshot
65
Appendix G – “Catalogue” screenshot
66
Appendix H – “Ticket” screenshot
67
Appendix J – “iTunes rates” screenshot
68
Appendix I – “Google Play store rates” screenshot
69
Appendix K – “English Rate” screenshot
70
Appendix L – “User Registration” screenshot
71
Appendix M – “Menu” screenshot
72
Appendix N – “Home Page” screenshot
73
Appendix O – “Schedule” screenshot
74
Appendix P – “Event Search Engine” screenshot
75
Appendix Q – “Fuorisalone iTunes rate” screenshot
76
Appendix R – “Fuorisalone Google Play rate” screenshot
77

Filling The Gap Bringing The Consumer Oriented Approach To The Events App Market Through The Lean Startup Methodology

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x Non Confidential □ Confidential

Title: Filling the gap: bringing the consumer oriented

Academic Year: 2014-2015

Dissertation / Project / Internship Report: Final Management Project 2014-2015

Student Name: De Domenico Giovanni

School Tutor / Evaluator Name: Rase Philippe

To fill in for Internship only:

Keywords: (cf. Thesaurus du Management):

II. Key definition

III. Events management industry and Design context significance

Human interactions still play a fundamental role and represent significant

ii. Events organization motivations

iii. Event benefits

b. Technology adoption and mobile development

The situation changes considerably in 2014, giving us an understanding more consistent

Mobile applications contribute to create a community environment for attendees besides

c. Design Industry, the potential target market

ii. The new environment

Companies have to adjust their business model components to the contemporary

IV. Events management Literature review and Lean Startup

Experience is pivotal concerning events analysis. By examining events and their

ii. Nature of events

iii. Events Challenges and Opportunities

Moreover, organizers face communicational related issues. What can be seen as

Finally, the organization stakeholders represent a valuable source of information that

b. The Lean Startup Methodology Analysis

ii. Lean Startup Methodology’s Five principles

iii. The Lean Startup’s contributions

These direct correspondence between learning consequences and metrics changes

iv. Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop

The Lean Startup Methodology integrates Steve Blank’s Customer Discovery:

b. Interviews’ choices drivers

c. Qualitative research value

VI. Data collection process and major issues faced

a. Data gathering challenge and process

Subsequently, we wanted to narrow the focus. Events are already something so

In conclusion, we had to integrate these findings in the existing business models. We

VII. Data analysis

a. Existing apps providers’ analysis

We dealt with the situation by comparing the two charts:

b. Design Week’s apps analysis

c. Value creation and growth hypothesis

Yu-Chin Chang – Design student - 07/07/2016

Figure 13 – The Flag

VIII. Results from data analysis

IX. Relevant implications and findings

a. Contribution to the existing literature

X. Limitation of the work

Appendix A – “Event Management” and “Networking” features

Appendix C – “Integration” and “Location and Travel” features

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