The X-Culture International Business Symposium brought together 51 X-Culture students from 15 countries across six continents who, in addition to participating in a business competition and career development program, had the chance to network, learn more about the world of international business, and meet and hear from international business scholars.
Last fall, when students participated in an educational competition during the X-Culture International Business Symposium, they were tasked with coming up with ideas for a challenge that will sound all too familiar to event organizers: prove the economic, social and cultural impact a major event can bring to a city.
The symposium was coordinated by the X-Culture program, which gives global business students a chance to solve a business challenge, in collaboration with the Academy of International Business Southeast Chapter Annual Conference at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, October 24-26, 2024.
Started in 2010, the X-Culture program is designed to bridge the gap between what international business students learn in a classroom and the real world of international business. Students from various countries are grouped into teams and spend months working together virtually on a solution to a challenge presented by a partner company, all while learning to navigate geographical and cultural differences — everything from time zones to languages to cultural customs.
This year, the program partnered with Maritz along with the BestCities Global Alliance to create the educational challenge. The partners chose a real congress — the 2030 World Congress of Dermatology — and asked students to submit an impact proposal demonstrating how the congress could potentially make a positive impact on one of the participating BestCities destinations: Dubai, Dublin, Cape Town, Singapore, Copenhagen, and Guadalajara. Representatives from Maritz and the DMOs provided coaching and mentoring support to the student teams throughout the process.
But according to Ben Goedegebuure, Maritz’s chief global strategy officer, it turned out to be as much of a learning experience for them as it was for the students.
We wanted to create a challenge for the students that would give us an insight into the impact of events.”
‘A Great Experiment’
“We wanted to create a challenge that would give us an insight into the impact of events,” said Goedegebuure, who participated as a judge.
According to BestCities and Goedegebuure, the results were varied but a few themes emerged from the students’ proposals: events should make a positive impact on their host destinations, benefit the local community they’re hosted in and communicate that impact, and sustainability should not be an afterthought.
Goedegebuure and Chaillo were both particularly impressed with how quickly students caught on to unraveling long-time challenges within the industry: like how to create more value for sponsors.
“I thought it was pretty insightful of a group that was only just touching at surface…had recognized that…the narrative that you need to create to attract sponsors is not easy,” Goedegebuure said. It used to be that sponsors were “happy for the company to be mentioned as a sponsor to an event and have their logo up there. And now people are going, ‘well, actually, that’s not enough.’”
During the symposium, students had the chance to tour Maritz headquarters in nearby Fenton, MO, where the Maritz team hosted an event to give the students an example of what they could create with a career in event production and design. That opportunity, along with working closely with BestCities and the DMO partners, gave students a glimpse of the breadth of the industry.
“The process itself was a great experiment,” said Eduardo Chaillo, Maritz’s global general manager for Latin America and founder of Global Meetings and Tourism Specialists, LLC, who also participated as a judge. “Because we always talk about the disconnect between academy and industry. I think this was a great way to bring the new players, or potential new players, in touch with the real world, from two perspectives.”
I think this [competition] was a great way to bring the new players, or potential new players, in touch with the real world.”
Piquing Curiosity
The competition was also an exercise for Maritz and the other partners in discovering how to attract more young people, a question that the industry has struggled to answer for a while, particularly since the pandemic. In the August 2022 issue of PCMA Convene, deputy editor Barbara Palmer wrote about how faculty at several hospitality schools are seeing fewer students interested in pursuing careers in events.
But, according to Chaillo, engaging with them directly in this way seemed to pique their understanding, and their curiosity, in a deeper way. “They got that this is not only about transactions and logistics, this is an industry that is a lot more than that…that can benefit a lot of people, not only in the economic way, but in the academic and the learning and the knowledge.”
“We [the industry] are always talking about, ‘how do we get young people excited about our industry?’ Goedegebuure said. “And this, for us, was one of the things [that] people can get very excited about it, by creating something that was specifically for them.”
On the Web
Learn more about the X-Culture Competition at x-culture.org/competition/.
