Last week I spent two days at the Swedish Market Research Day (SMRD), and annual event organised by Swedish researchers and spearheaded by the indefatigable Henrik Hall. Whilst no event is, or can be, perfect, the SMARD has much about it that others can learn from.
Amongst its key strengths are the following:
- The conference lasts just one day. Many events last 1.5 days, but in these cases many delegates tend to leave before the end of the event.
- The SMRD finishes with a really good social event, which is good for networking but also cuts down on the risk of people leaving early.
- The conference has a mixture of papers presented in English and Swedish, and this year used a mixture of one and two stream sessions to be able to provide an English option throughout the day, making it more attractive to international attendees.
- The papers were a mixture of local papers, invited international guests, commercial presentations, and a great keynote speaker (Teo Härén).
One consequence of the strength of the programme was that there were about 250 delegates and this in turn meant that there were a really large number of exhibitors.
One innovation at this year’s conference was to hold a workshop on the day before the conference (a Master Class in Multivariate Techniques run by me). This seemed a good idea and I hope that SMRD will make more use of this in the future as it can help with the costs of speakers.
There is a report of the conference on Research –Live. One of the features of the conference that this report picks up on is the atmosphere of the conference, which is much friendlier and informal than many others. SMRD takes research seriously, but it does not take itself too seriously.
The SMRD format would not suit all conferences or all countries (for example in a country which had many conferences, such as the UK things are different, in a very large country, like the US, things are different), but I think that the SMRD model is one that many other organisers should look at and decide which elements they should borrow.
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