IDBS Blog | 16th September 2019

What i3 Means to Us – Part 4

We sat down with Chelsea Hyde, Field Marketing Manager for North America at IDBS, to find out what i³ means to IDBS, and what to expect at future events.

What does i³ mean?

When we were coming up with the vision for the i³ event, we wanted three things to take place for our customers: to be able to share ideas, gain insights, and ultimately innovate together towards a better future for science.

What was your vision when you were originally conceiving this event?

We wanted people to be able to connect with one another and our technology. We wanted people to be able to share. Share their ideas, share their experiences, share their challenges. We wanted people to play, of course, play with our software, and we wanted people to learn.

I believe those things have been achieved in the past two years and we’re looking to build on the success that we’ve had with the customers who attended to make our third annual an even greater success.

What was the biggest takeaway from previous events?

The biggest thing that stood out to me was customers were comfortable. Customers were sharing insights and experience that they don’t get to share anywhere else.

A lot of the people that attend the event work in between R&D and IT, and they have a lot of struggles within their organization around change management, or internal and external collaboration and user adoption. They probably don’t have many people inside their organization that they can collaborate with on this topic. They’re kind of stuck in the middle.

So, we want to bring those people here and the people around them in their role at the event, to help them better understand they’re not alone, other people struggle with the same challenges and ultimately, we’re a community that can solve things together.

What can attendees expect at the 2019 i³ event?

In 2018, we achieved lift-off. There was so much collaboration among our attendees, we’re looking to hear more about what our customers have to say, what their challenges are, what they’re looking for from our technology, and what they’re looking for from us as partners.

I think i³ has been the place where that has taken shape, and we look to increase that.

In your role, you’re able to select locations for the coming year. What do you think about when you are considering the next location?

First and foremost, I want to make sure all our customers can get there relatively easily. But in addition to that, I want to make sure it’s a venue where people can have a little fun. In 2017 we were in Seattle, so we were actually in the clouds while we were discussing our cloud for E-WorkBook, which was really cool.

The venue dictates a lot of things about the event, it’s really important. You need a space where people can feel comfortable and have fun but also that’s appropriate for a business meeting, which all of these things are.

On top of that, we want to find a venue where customers, at the end of the day, after the meetings are over, can really enjoy themselves and have conversations get to know one another, and ultimately gain friends. This is a community that we’re trying to build up and gain support with.

For 2019, we had a poll going with different options, which we used along with feedback from our internal IDBS folks to decide our locations for the year – Nashville and London.