Korean update
After four trips to the land of the morning calm, I finally started to get a feeling for how we should adapt the LIFT concept to this continent. I must admit I was getting a bit nervous and felt like the LIFT Asia project was not moving much. The main reason is that it is extremely hard to get feedback from the locals on the different questions I had. Can we do a three days conference here? Can people convince their boss to pay for the ticket? Can we hold open sessions managed by the communities? Will Asians travel to attend a conference?
My pictures of Seoul and Korea are on Flickr.
I had - and still have - tons of questions I needed to find out about, but the local culture - which basically consists in never contradicting anyone - did not make my life easy and forced me to reformulate every question. The only way to get a true answer is to allow from the start the possibility of a diplomatic no.
For example, three days ago I visited the Raemian gallery to see a housing of the future exhibition created by Samsung and Microsoft. My friend Jean Morin was driving, and when we approached the gallery we quickly called our host to inquire about parking possibilities. We asked if we could leave the car in front of the building (because both of us are lazy and French). The answer was “yes of course no problem, but maybe the Police will take the car. The other solution is to use the parking lot further down the road”. Very elegant way of avoiding a negative answer.
So it takes time to get a strong intuition about anything in this country because relations are very subtle and different from the loud and clear feedback we get in Europe. Four 20′000km trips later, I finally have a strong feeling for what LIFT should be here. We will not replicate the Swiss event, but use the lessons learned over the past three editions to grow the Asian project.
We will start slow, with a two days conference featuring simple social events (i.e. fondue might be for next year), reduced community activities (I am thinking about keeping only open stage and discussions) and boasting a clear, interesting and easy-to-sell-to-your-boss theme. We will rely on strong local partners for all logistical, editorial and financial aspects. This should allow us to work around the various constraints we have (LIFT brand not yet known, lower salaries, less participatory culture, etc) and achieve our main goal: give lifters access to all the innovation and trends that are flourishing all around Asia. I got a demo of Naver (Korea’s leading portal) a few days ago, and it looked like Yahoo in 5 years, both from a service design and business model perspective. There are tons of ideas to be exchanged between Asia and the rest of the world, and this is what we’ll do.
