International Innovation Summits as Indicative Assemblages of Agents, Opportunities and Networks

On September 17, 2019, the yearly DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival has kicked off with an opening that brought together delegates from around the world to an off-the-beach reception venue overlooking the seashore, walking paths and those basking in the evening glow of the summer season.

A Blog Article by Pablo Markin.

However, what has brought the attendants of this event to this spot of the Mediterranean metropolitan landscape was the complex, and ever-shifting, arrangements of entrepreneurial networks at the heart of which the DLD Conference positions itself internationally. Despite their looseness, these networks can be argued to act as agile systems comprising hyper-mobile agents, bundles of inter-personal connections and down-the-road opportunities that interactions at this event, as well as similar ones, can help activate.

In this respect, the dynamic geography of DLD conferences, currently encompassing Singapore, Brisbane, Munich, Brussels and Tel Aviv, as well as occasionally other locations, such as Bayreuth, Karlsruhe, and Belgrade, can be argued to be responsive to tectonic shifts in the global economy. The addition of Singapore to this conference circuit from 2018 is a case in point, since this compact, one-day event, hosted at a posh hotel, situated in Sentosa Island, is aimed at capturing global trends in relation to location-relevant opportunities.

More specifically, the 2018 panel discussions at the Singapore event have comprised overviews of the changes in the global venture capital landscape, smart cities, of which Singapore is one of prime examples, the business opportunities in India and South-East Asia, cashless transactions, innovative manufacturing, blockchain-related digital disruptions, South-East Asian fashion trends, the Indonesian consumer market, Berlin-Singapore blockchain-based cooperation and Asia Pacific economic prospects.

What links all of these are the conference participants and attendants that make it possible for deterritorialized innovation-related networks, such as those attracted by the DLD Conference, to access anchor points in diverse localities to which urban centers act as gateways.

By Pablo Markin

Featured Image Credits: Daniel Rowing Center, Tel-Aviv, Israel, March 15, 2014 | © Courtesy of Amir Appel/Flickr.

This post initially was originally published in in Society, Media, Art, October 8, 2019, https://sma.hypotheses.org/208.