More Thoughts on HD Summit

--By Jason E. Goldberg, designer and project development, Rowland+Broughton Architecture & Urban Design

Infection is not the typical term one uses to discuss innovation, change, and motivation. However, this year my peers and I were infected by a stunning panel of speakers that lead the cutting edge of innovation at the recent Hospitality Design magazine's HD Summit in Pebble Beach, California. HD Summit is an invite-only hospitality industry conference that gathers the best and brightest in the hospitality industry and delivers a provocative, mind churning program that is meant to energize and infuse the industry with new strategies, motivating tactics, and renewed enthusiasm. This year’s featured a wide range of speakers from diverse unrelated industry sectors covering change; from how to weather the economic storm to using genetic code in finding solutions and ideas for the new decade. Below is a list of key speakers and topics that I felt were worthy of sharing. Our firm intends to take the information that I brought back with me, and integrate them into our design process, project management, and marketing. 

• Jeremy Gutsche, author of Exploiting Chaos: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change emphasized the necessity to see opportunity in times of crisis. He showcased examples of companies that have thrived during economic uncertainty and provided customers with new products and services that changed the world. His term “Infectious Marketing” made everyone in the audience sit up straight and take note on how they will infect their own marketing strategies. Gutsche states that infection begins from within an organization. He advised that companies should remove the walls that separate people and ideas. 

• Learning about cutting edge genetic advancements from Juan Enriquez, founder/CEO of Biotechonomy opened my eyes on how technological advances in biology have created some dramatic new approaches and solutions that changed the world. Enriquez presented several examples of how the manipulation of genetic code has been used to regenerate human skin for burn victims and how prosthetics have been developed for athletes and runner. Simply stated technology has created an innovative market, with this comes change. 

• How to turn good ideas into great results was presented by Peter Sheahan author of Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head--and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings. Sheahan explained that consumers require more tangible evidence that products and services are worth the money and investment. All consumers regardless of generation now require more viable results that prove a product or service is of value. This is especially true in the architecture and design world.  

Gutsche really drove home the “Infectious Marketing” concept by discussing everyone’s number one marketing tool—word of mouth. Yet Gutsche is taking the “word of mouth” concept one step further by encouraging firms to be “supercharged” and relentlessly obsess about their “story”, who you are, what you do, and how you do it. What will you be doing to become infectious and stay above the rest? I encourage you to share this review with others in the hospitality industry and elsewhere. 

Comments

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