Monday Morning Marketer: From Startup to Scaleup (VivaTech recap)

Another VivaTech has come and gone, and much like a visit to an all-you-can-eat buffet, the options available were more than one single person could handle in one sitting. Nevertheless, I made a valiant effort to stuff myself and satiate my appetite for all things tech and innovation (I promise, this is the last eating analogy).

When asked by others for my overall impressions from this year's event, I admit that I wasn't blown away by any specific new technologies that we hadn't seen before — virtual reality, augmented reality, conversational AI, and predictive analytics were well represented, as they were in prior years (full disclosure — I tended to stick to booths and sessions catering (ok, maybe one more) to retail and consumer products, so this may not have been the case for transportation, finance, or any other industry).

So does that mean that this year's VivaTech was a letdown? Not at all — the event has just evolved to reflect the continuing evolution of the technology and innovation it features, with several speakers and companies returning from prior years. In place of introducing new, leading edge technologies, much of the conversation involved how to advance ideas to commitment, with many prominent speakers sharing the progress they'd made on key initiatives outlined the previous year, the best example being the Tech for Good Summit led by President Emmanuel Macron and tech leaders like Ginni Rometty from IBM (e.g., France becoming the 14th country to launch P-TECH schools).

This message, shifting from WHAT to HOW innovation is delivered, repeated itself in many sessions, from keynotes by heads of state to burgeoning startups in breakout sessions at partners' booths, to the messaging companies use to market themselves. 

At a macro level, it involves how government and private companies work together here in Europe to build a startup ecosystem that delivers growth & innovation, while also protecting the social/economic model of many EU nations. 

It requires them to build the training infrastructure to “upskill” not just employees, but citizens as well, closing the digital divide between the top 20% and bottom 20% in digital literacy on ...

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