The main result has been the successful staging of the conference on 31 March – 1 April. All activities pre-, during and post-event and post-event have been carried out and completed. To ensure a successful conference, the work was organised into the following work packages and activities.
1. Project management; this entailed the management of the overall conference organisation and the development of the content and scheduling of the programme together with the European Commission, the Ministry of Economic Affairs as well as the European Investment Bank, the European Investment Fund, Fluent Digital Capital (Fund of Funds), the Dutch Incubation Association, the CrowdfundingHub, the innovation centre at Leiden-The Hague university, the InvestHorizon and Eureka Innovest programmes and the Enterprise Europe Network. Achieved: attractive and varied programme with more than 20 (parallel) sessions.
2a. Speaker management; worked with the Commission, the Ministry and other partners to invite and attract the right quality and quantity of session moderators and speakers for the programme. Developed a briefing pack for session moderators and speakers. Achieved: attendance of the Minister of Economic Affairs, the Commissioner for Science, Research and Innovation, other high-level speakers and in total more than 100 speakers.
2b. Guest management; developed the list of invitees (building on the list already provided) for the purpose of this conference (Ideas from Europe, growth companies). Contacted European and national networks to get as broad a distribution of the invitation as possible. In addition to the partners above this included for example the Dutch Banking Association. The objective was to get a good mix of financiers (institutional and private) and entrepreneurs.
Achieved: 400 participants; from a mailing list with 9% of business representatives the actual attendance of business representatives was 47% and 12% represented finance.
3. Communication; communicated and disseminated information before and during the conference to raise attention and interest with speakers, participants and press. Post-event all speakers and participants were thanked and advised of photos, presentations and videos being available on the website. of The broader objective was to raise awareness of the financial instruments available at EU, national and local level. Main means of communication were the website and direct email with registered participants. Achieved: website, high level of speaker and guest satisfaction with the amount and quality of communication.
4. Production; encompassed the provision of all technical and logistic facilities, from locations, to wifi, light, audio, video, power etc. and including the conference website. Plenary and parallel sessions were available via livestream. Most striking achievement was the building of a temporary, purpose-built glass pavilion on the Hofvijver in The Hague.
