Sustainable Event Management: New Perspectives for the Meeting Industry Through Innovation and Digitalisation?

Abstract

Through their growth in the postmodern and capitalist-oriented economies, “meetings”, all forms of MICE events (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, Exhibitions) represent purely quantitative, ever more comprehensive, resource-consuming gatherings. Such a development does not only increase the complexity of the business gatherings in terms of their global economic importance, but also in terms of increasing CO2 emissions. In recent years there has been a response to this development and new potentials for a sustainable meeting industry has been created, driven also by the megatrend of digitalisation, and the innovations related to it. Although sustainability of meetings have already been discussed more from the perspective of environmentally friendly or resource-conserving use, the aim of this paper is to discuss innovative examples like virtual or hybrid events, i.e. a kind of mixed event consisting of physical and digital meetings. The methodology approach is based on a theoretical background and in the gathering of empirical evidence, combined with a literature review. The results indicate positive opportunities, risks and challenges by virtual and hybrid meetings by a sustainable perspective that contribute to solutions that go beyond the general approach of sustainability in the debate.