(reporting from Barcelona)

It used to be said that the first sign of a recession would be the disappearance of conferences and exhibitions – reflecting belt tightening by major corporate organisations in all areas of ‘discretionary expenditure’.

This was certainly said of the telecoms sector when the eCommerce bubble burst in 2002 but now it seems that experience was more of a correction from the overblown hype driven by creative accounting and false reporting, primarily in the USA.

The origins of our current fiscal fragility are similar – reinforcing the view that our collective memories, or resolve to regulate, will decay until the next upheaval brings us back to reality.  Then we debate a remarkably similar set of remedies – usually centred on teasing apart things that are too complex to manage.  It really doesn’t much matter if it’s banks or Telco’s, energy companies or even health services.

The debate rages.  It usually lasts long enough for the targets of our collective ire to resist change and to carry on as if nothing had happened except, of course, for the grateful receipt of tax-payers’ money to paper over the cracks in their accounting diligence.

Now and again there’s a compromise or fudge (like ‘functional separation’ or some other pseudo-regulatory gambit) but, if one returns to reading the correspondence of journals like the Harvard Business Review of 1991 (‘Rescuing banks may mean reinventing the banking system’), you soon realise how little has been learned or changed.

This current recession does, however, have some interesting twists.  The conference and exhibition business has not withered but in many areas has actually prospered as views of what is, or is not, ‘discretionary’ have shifted.

We are, this time around, generally more optimistic and, it seems, better able to cope with the consequences of our regulators’ former addiction to ‘deficient market theories’.  We seem now more-ready to get cracking on rebuilding our businesses.  What else could explain the rises in job losses but apparent reductions in the unemployment registers – apart, perhaps, from a double-dip of dodgy accounting.

In Barcelona this week, for the World of Health IT conference and exhibition, there were few signs of a recession.  The country, according to economists, is reported to be one of the ‘pigs' (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) but the restaurants and bars were full, the shops were doing great business, few had been shuttered, the buses and trams ran to time and the exhibition space was sold out.

It was much the same last month for the Mobile World Congress.  We sat and watched a procession of yachts berthing in the marina and, apart from an undercurrent of street crime, the place seemed generally healthy and well maintained.

These sector-rooted events benefit from their specialist positions – people feel they must be there - but there is also a trend towards the generic and collaborative exhibition appearance.  Only a few large organisations seek a dominant presence and even Microsoft expected a delegate fee to listen to their pitch.

More interesting was the ‘channel partner’ approach of Dell with a stand populated by companies representing Dell’s partnering ‘eco-system’.  Ergotron, for example, might just as easily been at an Education sector event but, on this occasion, their hardware (for portable computer stations) was selected for its hospital applicability.

More interesting still were the stands from Sweden and Denmark proudly extolling the virtues of their national health strategies.  The healthy enthusiasm of Scandinavian countries to exhibit their successes was earning dividends for their life-sciences industries.  In conference and workshops the talk of innovation and fresh thinking was peppered with examples and case studies from these countries.

We know that the UK’s NHS is very highly regarded throughout Europe.  Conference sessions occasionally feature NHS speakers, but we should not underestimate the value of a larger exhibition presence funded, perhaps, through UK Trade & Industry with (Dell-like) an NHS core surrounded by leading innovative companies from the UK.

You can imagine how NHS departmental budget managers, especially in these straitened times, would hesitate to propose overseas promotional forays but, in the same way that policy developers are gradually waking up to the interconnectedness of things and the need for greater flexibility across Departmental boundaries, the centrality of health and digital development for economic recovery surely deserves a little more enlightened consideration.

The UK’s economic recovery demands that we take every European opportunity to make an exhibition of ourselves.

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Notes:

1.  HBR Debate, July-August 1991, pp144-161, commentaries on Lowell L Bryan’s ‘Blueprint for Financial Reconstruction’ published in the previous issue.  “Judging from the diversity of these opinions, it is easy to see why we are having so much trouble getting a consensus in Washington”

2. The Danish health sector exhibition at WoHIT 2010 promoted more than 50 IT companies in the health sector and was based around the core of Medcom (www.medcom.dk), sundhed, the Danish eHealth portal (www.sundhed.dk) , Connected Digital Health (www.sdsd.dk ), the association of Danish Municipalities (www.kl.dk) and the Association of Danish regions (www.regioner.dk ).

See also 'Drastic Surgery for Health Services ?'