The manufacturing space might not be the first place one would think to look for extraordinary events. But once you meet LiveWorx, your view of B2B events is likely to change entirely.
Hosted every June in Boston and attracting a crowd of technologists, engineers and manufacturing leaders, LiveWorx is transforming the traditional event model into a technology storytelling festival.
Keynotes have included the NFL’s CIO, the former CTO of the United States, and an AI expert who created a plant-robot hybrid (seriously). Show floor demos include a live augmented reality experience used to service farming equipment; the ability to leverage CAD designs in real-time to customize a yacht right before your eyes; and generating real-time IoT data from beer taps.
Between demos and keynotes, the event peppers the experience with celebrity-hosted socials spanning the Boston seaport, including guest appearances by actor Paul Rudd and Game of Thrones stars Richard Madden (Robb Stark) and Alfie Allen (Theon Greyjoy).
To learn more about how LiveWorx is changing Boston’s event scene, DX Journal spoke with some of the team behind the curtain.
Photo courtesy LiveWorx
LiveWorx has lived its own digital transformation
LiveWorx was born inside PTC, a global software company that works in the industrial space helping manufacturers use technology to drive digital transformation. The event was initially launched (under a different name) for PTC software clients to come together and share best practices.
Over the last four years the event has changed entirely.
LiveWorx moved into the Boston Convention Center in order to create space for exciting new programming, including main stage experiences with aerial acrobatics, a life-size transport truck and 3-level stage, dozens of technology demos and hundreds of breakout sessions from digital transformation leaders.
Photo courtesy LiveWorx
And the shift in the event’s model and experience worked. LiveWorx grew from an average attendance of 1,500-1,800 people in 2015 to more than four times that number today.
One of the visionaries behind the transformation is Devin Cleary. A self-described “renaissance experiential marketer” and vice president of experiential marketing for PTC, Cleary spearheads the vision for LiveWorx with a team of nine.
Cleary’s broad range of career roles include work as senior director of resources for the American Red Cross and as an events experience strategist with sales and marketing software company Hubspot. This mix of wide, varied experience powers the core of LiveWorx’s interdisciplinary presentation.
Devin Cleary, Vice President of Experiential Marketing for PTC. – Photo courtesy LiveWorx
At its core, LiveWorx stands out because of its team’s relentless focus on creating moments of surprise and delight that demonstrate a deep connection between humans and technology.
“I look in the most unfamiliar places for inspiration,” Cleary said in an interview with DX Journal. “We look at multiple inspiration facets, from fashion to pop culture, to science, to literature, to history, to futurism. We do everything from blogs to videos to interviews, to participating in things like a fashion week so that we can get a sense of how everything can fit together. We take major global trends and translate them into a business context.”
Photo courtesy LiveWorx
LiveWorx features a vital reimagination of the expo hall called Xtropolis that provides demonstrations of full production cycles and the technology powering the future of manufacturing — IIoT, blockchain, AR, VR, AI, 3D printing, spatial computing — and how they all work together within a living, breathing business setting. And with a 200,000 foot exhibition area and more than100 exhibitors, the event floor has become a storytelling festival.
Photo courtesy LiveWorx
“The desire that we have to drive our company’s message into the marketplace is to communicate value,” said Eric Snow, senior vice president of corporate marketing at PTC, in an interview at LiveWorx. “I think we have sort of found a little bit of a secret sauce here, that if you combine education with entertainment and really delight people by using physical objects as a canvas to share digital stories, that can really be memorable and repeatable and shareable.”
A learning experience curated to impress
With so many technology events out there, it’s hard to stand out. But LiveWorx pushes a hands-on, multi-disciplinary approach to its technology tracks and featured displays that captivate its audience, boosting the attendee numbers each year. PTC even encourages competitors to attend in order to better amplify innovation and benefit the education of the thousands of attendees at LiveWorx.
Photo courtesy LiveWorx
“Over the last three or four years we’ve really transformed LiveWorx and sought to have the event transcend PTC,” said Snow. “We would like to have people come to this event who do business with PTC, or don’t do business with PTC, because we think there’s a tremendous amount of learning that the whole community can experience and share with each other.”
That learning is another key differentiator for the event.
“The benefit of going to LiveWorx is that you can accelerate your learning cycle and absorb and adopt a year’s worth of education in less than seven days,” said Cleary. “That is incredibly powerful. But don’t take my word for it, just look at the 7,000 individuals and technologists who are coming yearly and recognize the boutique quality of how we orchestrate and lay this out. We’re not just focused on the trends — we’re focused on everything to make sure no one is left behind.”
The process is intended to be open-ended, said Cleary, so that the event delivers insights to everyone, no matter what their background is.
Driving tech events into the future
Cleary has big ideas for LiveWorx and where it goes next.
“I want to make sure that companies out there with other events that are comparable in size want to partner with us,” said Cleary. “We should come together to create the mother of all technology events that changes the way people interact, the way they network and the way they absorb content.”
The event is also pushing ahead with a diversity focus that other tech conferences should take note of, committing to 50 percent of presenters to come from diverse backgrounds inclusive of gender and race within the next three years. And that goal is already seeing results — 11 percent of attendees self-identified as women in 2018 and that number increased to 21 percent in 2019.
Cathy Hackl, a world renowned augmented reality, virtual reality and spatial computing futurist speaks at LiveWorx 2019. – Photo courtesy LiveWorx
Cleary noted that in its initial efforts to increase diversity and inclusion at the event, LiveWorx has provided same sex bathrooms and women’s mentorship workshops in order to empower the next generation of female leaders and technologists.
“This is a personal passion project of mine, and it’s something that I’m so grateful that the rest of the organization has fully embraced and will continue to embrace as we go onward,” he said. “This is an event that is truly setting a trend and leading the events industry, changing the way the industry works and operates.”
Pushing ahead with diversity goals is all part of the holistic, human event that Cleary and his team are working hard to build.
“For me, at the end of the day, it’s not just about the success of the event in terms of the numbers, the growth and the acceleration. It’s really about the ways we operate and cooperate, and the way that technology is allowing us to free up our time so we can focus on more creative and innovative tasks. The sky is really the limit.”
Adam Savage in Xtropolis. – Photo courtesy LiveWorx
So what’s next for LiveWorx?
The event has already started hosting smaller co-located events as part of the larger event offering and it will head further in that direction under the vision of “we are better together.”
The event will also look to expand outside its current home at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center to create hubs around the city and include the entire tech ecosystem in a week-long innovation festival.
“The event we’re producing in 2019 will look minuscule compared to the event we’ll be orchestrating in 2021,” Cleary said.
