Meetovation - Where Smart Brains Meet

They tried it on children and created geniuses and now the Danish are revitalising meetings with colour and ideas and injecting brain food into the process to speed up the decision-making.

Have you heard the one about Return on Meeting Investments (ROMI)? Well, the Danish have embraced their creative skills and initiated a service to eliminate boring meetings – they call it meetovation. Meetovation is designed to end boring one-way communication and traditional meeting room layouts. The idea is to aim for a better ROMI – and increase your sustainability.

However, it is not all about boring meetings in Denmark, they also ensure that it is environmentally friendly and that participants attain some form of intelligence so as to enjoy the meetings too. For this, a team of Danish brain researchers and cooks have researched far and wide and discovered how food affects the way the brain works. Apparently, nuts, chocolate, curry, tomatoes, beetroots, garlic, honey, maple syrup and green tea stimulate the brain. So avoid sugar, meat and fatty foods and excessive coffee and you are on your way to becoming Einstein; serve these at your meetings and your participants will stay awake throughout the discussions. There is strong evidence that omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil can lower cholesterol, help stave off Alzheimer’s disease and make us smarter, so this is high on the menu too.

To create a successful meeting, set up a lively meeting room and then drum in some invigorating activities and bingo you are sure to close the meeting with some sensible corporate decisions.

How do they do this? – For meetovation, it is all about Participation, Flexibility, Responsibility, Evaluation and Relocation. The key issue here is that participants are encouraged to engage actively and have a new creative approach to a far more flexible use of conference facilities. The shapes of the meetings are different than traditional meetings. The Danish are convinced that breaking with one-way communication is a liberating experience for delegates and organisers alike. The Meetovation project has been created by VisitDenmark, the Official Tourism Organisation of Denmark, in co-operation with experts from the regional meeting and congress agencies, professional facilitators, manager advisors and meeting organisers as well as a wide selection of Danish conference centres, hotels and culture institutions. The project is co-financed with support from the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs.

Chefs, meeting planners as well as conference and meetings destinations across the globe are now working together to ensure that food served at meetings help people to stay sharp throughout the day. They are also introducing creative processes into meeting setups.