It took us quite a while to study all the survey results - understand, analyze and digest your numerous comments. Many thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate it ! And a big thank you to OWL Re, the independent company who has been running the Lift satisfaction survey of the participants for the last six years.

Here comes a “short” recap of the Lift13 Survey results, to share back your great inputs. Besides the survey results we also tried to consider as much as possible the feedback on the Lift13 experience provided through many postings on blogs, twitter and Facebook.

First of all, we are very happy that Lift continues to be an inspiring and meaningful experience for the vast, vast majority of you, where you get new ideas and meet new people, and often also develop new professional projects.

Another thing, that we care very much about, is that Lift seems to be able to maintain a healthy balance between attracting new Lift participants, all the while keeping a core of long-time Lifters, that have accompanied the Lift adventure for the past years and still are our most important supporters. For Lift13 the percentage of "repeating" Lifters has been again over 60%.

Key Insights at Lift13

Tag cloud of responses to question: “What was the most inspiring and innovative insight you had at Lift13?”

Although we would love to indulge a bit more in the positive feedbacks, to soothen our stressed conference organizers hearts ;) let’s move forward now and discuss the top improvement requests that you proposed:

Interactive and timely Workshops

Let’s start with the one area that has crystallised a great number of improvement requests: the workshops. Being a key element of the Lift program, the workshops are proposed and run by participants and offer a great opportunity to connect with fellow Lifters and have more in-depth discussions of topics related to the program.

Based on Lift12 survey results we decided to create the "Build-a-workshop-toolkit" with our friends at Stimmt, to make the workshops more interactive and worth your time. We were happy to read that many of you have noticed and appreciated the improved, interactive experience. But still you mentioned the following improvement potentials :

• "Improve the workshop registration process": yes, we totally agree and for Lift14 you will be able to register online in due time before the conference. But we still will keep a few seats to be allocated at the event. Finding a way to make sure people actually go to the workshops they registered for instead of the one that feels good the day of the event remains a challenge of course :)

• “Workshop outcomes should be more included into the Lift program. Perhaps info screen with results (images, videos...), or special hashtag/tumblr for workshops which are shown in the lounge... perhaps a pool where all results could be posted to?!”.  Great idea and we will work on this for our upcoming event. Also we have started sharing the workshop results we got from the moderators on our Facebook and Twitter. Do you have a workshop recap you would like to share? Ping us :)

• "How long does a workshop lasts?" The program needs to inform not only about the starting- but also the ending point, good point well made - although of course good things sometimes just last as long as they have to.

• "Time management issue regarding workshops" +"More efforts to insure participation and interaction": We will ensure to address both time management and interaction even more in the briefing calls with the workshop moderators. We will continue to develop our toolkit in this sense and support workshop leaders implementing it.

• "Possible not to have sessions and workshops at the same time?" That’s a tough one, that has already been discussed intensively in the past years: the reason we do run workshops in parallel to sessions is 1) to give an alternative program for those who might not be interested in the session topic 2) to feature a majority of the workshop topics, as we only have 2,5 days for the conference and receive many great workshop proposals.

Contradictory Speakers and Program Preferences

Concerning speakers, some of you perceived certain Lift13 speakers as too «commercial» and self-promotional and asked us to work on this issue. We are already really tough in the speakers coaching regarding self-promotion, but we will put even more emphasis on an idea-sharing-oriented, non commercial delivery of their speech.  There were also several requests for more geographical diversity, with speakers from Asia and Africa, that we will try to accommodate.

Regarding the program topics and sessions the survey outcomes have been contradictory for the past eight editions of Lift : there are always 50% who wish for less business-oriented, more «inspirational» speeches and the other 50% who crave more hands-on and actionable content, business-to-business you could say. As in every survey we have participants rating the same speaker as the best, that others rated as the most disappointing.

This contradiction perfectly illustrates the challenge (and asset!) of the diverse Lift audience, with different interests and complementary tastes. As we surely all agree that this diversity among participants and speakers actually is a key factor for Lift being an interesting, dynamic and fertile ground for innovation and discussions, we cannot solve this issue on the main stage.

What we can and are doing, however, is offering workshops during sessions that risk to be too much «special-interest». And independently from the different thematic preferences our editorial team will continue in putting all their energy in bringing you some of the world’s most inspirational speakers - and speakers that you’ll have seen here first, before they make the world news as happened again this year. So stay tuned for the first Lift14 speakers announcements!

Connecting with participants

Another comment that was insightful (Anna’s complete blogpost on her Lift13 experience is worth a read) :  “The name badges seem to have been standardized, whereas previously discovering your badge was part of the surprise, deciphering its meaning a playful challenge…”  Let’s put it like this: we plan to keep on surprising you :)

Another issue, which several of you shared in the survey, is the participants list being integrated too late on the new website. And of course the buddy system from the old website missing. We all have felt something was missing and that’s why we are already full speed working on this issue and exploring the best option for Lift14. We totally acknowledge the importance of some form of a participant list, enhanced with options for social connections, to be available ahead of the conference for those of you who take the time to prepare. Expect this to be available for Lift14. On the other hand there’s no need to build another LinkedIn or Facebook, and nobody longs for having to maintain yet another online profile.

Then we were happy to read that our different initiatives connecting participants in a playful way, like the speed dating session in collaboration with W.I.R.E. and the Röstigraben Express have resonated positively with many of you.

We are already cooking up new matchmaking initiatives, for those of you who wish for a more curated approach of meeting amazing new people. All the while we take care of keeping these initiatives opt-in, leaving these participants alone that continue to cherish a more serendipitous approach of meeting new people and old friends.

Let's meet: Apéro June 17th in Geneva

Again, thank you all very much for your positive encouragements, feedbacks and improvement ideas, that allow us to keep the Lift adventure evolving. And bravo for reading all the way through this recap! For those of you based around Geneva or happening to be in town mid-June: Let’s continue the discussion on June 17th at the Lift office, where we will be hosting a “Brainstorming Apéro”. It would be a pleasure to see you there! We will limit the number of people to 40 people to allow for decent interactivity, therefore rsvp quickly by sending us an e-mail to info@liftconference.com to save your seat. A bientôt!

Steve Portigal, who delighted us with his speech Lift11 speech "Discover and act on insights about people" just published his first book:

Interviewing Users explains how to succeed with interviewing, including:

• Embracing how other people see the world
• Building rapport to create engaging and exciting interactions
• How to listen effectively in order to build rapport

Our editorial colleague Nicolas Nova reviewed the book and obvisously loved it: 

"A great how-to handbook for anyone engaged in user interviews, conducted in a design context. The book is packed with ideas, guidelines, and tricks on how to surface relevant insights for new products and services. This book is a fantastic compilation of insights and methodological tricks!"

Get your copy: Use discount code LIFTCO2013 to get 20% off Steve's book here.  Also on May 15th Steve will be doing a free webcast entitled Interviewing Users: Uncovering Compelling Insights, join in!

Recently Sylvie met Thomas Gauthier at the Lift office for coffee. Thomas is co-founder of Biometis, a startup which offers data-driven decision support services to healthcare companies.

Thomas relocated to Geneva a few months ago to teach strategy at Haute École de Gestion. Discussing the upcoming Open Knowledge Conference, Sylvie and Thomas started talking about the potential of open data and its impact on business models. Thomas is convinced that smartly leveraged open data is not only a huge source of insights and competitive intelligence - it is also straightforwardly helpful to realize substantial savings. The following case study illustrates his claim.

Input: Open Data. Outcome: Higher Market Share.

Our case study features the French ultrasound business unit of a global medical imaging company. It has now essentially reached maximum market penetration with its high-end ultrasound imaging systems: virtually every single radiology department in every single French hospital holds at least one piece of equipment from this manufacturer. A very comfortable situation of course, but also an urgent call to explore the market potential of unchartered territories.

The company found out that apart from the radiologists themselves, hepatologists (i.e. liver experts)  and gastroenterologists (i.e. gut experts) are resorting more and more to ultrasound exams. But what to do with that information, how to turn these clinicians into new customers? Our manufacturer knew little about them. First and foremost, they needed to meet the key opinion leaders and the early adopters, and understand how they influence each other. But what do you do, apart of course from going to all the right conferences? Can we do better if we let the data speak?

Distill the World’s Largest Public Medical Database

That’s where Thomas and Biometis, the company he co-founded with Nicolas Colson, came in: they leveraged existing, readily available open data to provide the insights needed for conquering new markets in a highly targeted way, using limited sales and marketing resources. As a first step they tapped in their professional networks and interviewed expert specialists, structuring the subject area in what knowledge managers like to call ontologies, which are formal representations of all the current knowledge about the targeted markets.

In a second step the ontologies were put to work in a big data analysis of a number of data streams including PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine’s database which contains more than 22 million citations from the biomedical literature. Algorithms (including web crawling and indexing, natural language processing, and maching learning) crunched these massive amounts of data and turned them into key opinion leader and influence network maps. Then it was an easy thing to go to the next step: sketching market access strategy plans, identifying the most promising market entry points, and eventually approaching the most critical-to-acquire key opinion leaders.

Subsequently, our ultrasound manufacturer deployed their sales and marketing team - straight towards the strategic prospects, thanks to the deep understanding of who and what matters in the newly targeted markets.       

Finding new Return On Data

Sylvie asked Thomas how much he thinks the costs savings represented, compared to a more traditional, less informed marketing approach. He said that although hard to quantify, he estimated the amount to exceed several hundred thousand Euros… An amount which doesn’t include the added gains in terms of time-to-market which ultimately yields additional costs savings and increased revenue streams. This was not rocket science, and this was not the result of proprietary data hoarding either: it was just a clever way to find new “ROD”, or “Return on Data”, a small investment in creating new results and fresh insights from open data.

This case study demonstrates that there’s much work to be done and much benefits to be harvested turning huge amounts of public data into actionable knowledge for businesses. UK’s Open Data Institute is already running a dedicated incubator for start-ups. We are very curious to see who Switzerland’s next movers will be.

Learn more about open data business models at the upcoming Open Knowledge Conference, taking place September 17-18 at the CICG in Geneva. Grab your early bird ticket now.

We are pleased to announce our next event: the Open Knowledge Conference, taking place September 17-18 in Geneva. The world’s leading open data and open knowledge event, OKCon is the latest in an annual series run since 2005. Some of you probably remember Rufus Pollock, the founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation, talk at Lift12. In his passionate presentation Rufus introduced the idea of open data and illustrated its explosive growth in government, research and business.

We are looking forward to further explore this huge potential of open data transforming society, government and the economy in this year's edition of OKCon, presented under the patronage of Federal Councillor Alain Berset, member of the Swiss Government.

Last year’s OK event in Helsinki welcomed more than 1000 participants from over 50 countries and was the largest event of its kind to date. Previous speakers have included inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Hans Rosling of Gapminder, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation and other major figures in the open knowledge community.

Learn more about about OKCon on the eventpage and check out the video of the 2012 event in Helsinki. Join the open data event of the year and grab your early bird ticket now :)