The man who's saving the world from boring meetings

When Bo Krüger was growing up, he wanted to be a vet. “When I got older, I realised I was more interested in humans than animals!”

Krüger is a speaker at the Business Tourism Conference in Edinburgh on 1 December. His brief is to show how you can increase the value of meetings and conferences, to think differently about how you sell, promote and deliver events. It will be “interactive, different and memorable,” promises the conference programme.

Prepare to be involved; that seems to be Krüger’s message. He describes himself as a “meeting designer, facilitator and author”. A former actor, his previous job was at the Danish Institute of Technology, where he was a consultant on innovation and creativity.

“At the institute, I went to hundreds of meetings and was often bored or felt I was wasting my time,” he said. “I decided I wanted to change that, by helping people to create fantastic meetings by engaging the participants.”

EventsBase magazine has experience of a couple of Krüger’s approaches but we don’t want to give anything away and diminish the effect of his presentation on the day. But, as we have said, prepare to be involved – possibly as a nominated spokesperson or, even, in an assumed identity.

Krüger is also the co-creator of Meetovation, a feature of VisitDenmark’s business events department. It was conceived in 2003, the result of a joint public-private project called ‘The Meeting Concept of the Future’, whose tagline was ‘No more boring meetings!’ Backed by around £500,000 of public and private funding, Meetovation was developed as a product that has now trained around 180 staff in 80 hotels, conference and congress centres, museums and theatres all over Denmark.

“The concept was initiated by VisitDenmark after a lot of research on what creates values in meetings,” said Krüger. “Basically it is a recipe for how to create meetings with higher value for participants and meeting owners.

“There are five ingredients in Meetovation – participant involvement, creative setup, local inspiration,
sustainability and return on investment.

“It has given us some unique selling points that attracts attention from clients and media all over the world [and] it has branded Denmark as a very innovative and sustainable destination.”

Krüger founded his company, Moving Minds, a venture that sprang from the worst meeting he attended: “A two-hour launch of the new IT system in a big company I was working for.

“We were 500 people standing up in a way to small room, while an IT consultant went through 200 slides. There was no coffee and I never understood why I had to know about the system.

“The good thing, about the event was, that I learned I would save myself and the rest of the world from bad meetings. I wrote a book about meeting facilitation, which subsequently became a bestseller and turned me into a meeting expert.”