Serving a diverse European audience with a demanding appetite for learning and networking, EMEC 2012 will connect inventive thinkers inside and outside the industry at this annual conference held by Meeting Professionals International (MPI). Event delegates will experience, and experiment with, new meeting design formats and educational opportunities as never before. This enables them to take the time to explore new ideas and theories in a risk-free environment with colleagues before putting innovative new strategies into action.

Those delegates needing to channel their entrepreneurial spirit will enjoy hearing from Sahar Hashemi, a British entrepreneur and the co-founder of Coffee Republic, who developed a £30 million turnover business. She first introduced the tea-drinking British market to U.S.-like coffee consumerism, has started innovative venture Skinny Candy and advises thousands of new business start-ups each year. But it’s Hashemi’s outlook on innovation in modern business that will prove most insightful for delegates, enabling them to look for unique opportunities they can leverage in their own business and leadership practices.

Hashemi won’t be the only innovator on the main stage. Catch ground-breaking, Hungarian musical innovator Balázs Havasi—fresh from performing for 200 million at the Shanghai Expo. A TED global presenter and Guinness World Record holder, Havasi is known for his “most piano key hits in one minute” set at the Academy of Music Budapest and is described as an ambitiously thoughtful pianist and songwriter with a unique perspective when it comes to “re-imagined innovation.”

Delegates who aren’t regular members of MPI will have a unique opportunity to experience some of the programming that takes place at the chapter level.  MPI capitalises on its chapters’ exceptional programmes, and has selected two from its “Best of the Best” competition to appear at EMEC. MPI France presents Mike Clanton and “Don’t Let Your Event’s Technology Zombie Control You!” focusing on successfully planning and executing technology-dependent events. Meanwhile MPI Netherlands brings Dr. Xander Kranenburg and “Beyond Digital Creativity - Mashup all your ideas,” with insights on techniques and tools that help professionals work more efficiently and enhance creative events.

The FIFA World Cup uses the storyline: “One game changes everything.” With the World Cup, FIFA is creating incredible national and global communities all around an event. NIKE is even taking it a step further with their “Write the Future” campaign invoking fans and athlete celebrities from around the world to dream their own story of success around the World Cup…and NIKE products of course.

As meeting professionals, we believe human connections are the most powerful forces accessible to mankind—they build community, inspire innovation, activate leadership and create opportunities. That’s why we can confidently say, “When we meet, we change the world.”

There seems to be no end to the challenges facing humans these days: economic crises, volcanic ash, oil spills. But I also believe that connecting people and their ideas are fundamental to finding solutions we could never have imagined on our own. Never have there been so many cultures and perspectives to connect with. Never have there been so many connection channels for people to use (or abuse). The art, science and magic of creating human connections in a complex world has never been more valuable than right now. And meeting and event professionals are virtuosos at creating communities that unleash the energy that proliferates when powerful human connections ignite.

Building community using a meeting as the activation vehicle is not a new idea by any stretch, but its importance as an engagement approach and co-creation engine keeps elevating as our worlds get more complex.

Creating and unleashing community energy is increasingly a powerful and deliberate outcome of a well-designed event in two ways: First, by co-creating innovative solutions to challenges or opportunities, attendees crystallize a powerful spirit of community ownership that almost always results in a greater success rate when the idea is broadly introduced. And for some of the challenges facing nations and organizations at the moment, innovation is essential to their survival. Secondly, meeting attendees develop an enduring common connection to a shared experience, idea or set of values that can be activated at/when needed. Brands such as Apple and Nike use their events by creating experiences to build and activate communities of followers to drive sales and brand buzz that endure well beyond the event itself. The recent iPhone 4 launch event was so successful at driving pre-sales that it overwhelmed the on-line order platform.

Community does not just randomly happen at a meeting or event. It has to be designed by the meeting professional using a balance of provocative inspiration, emotional engagement and attendee participation. Companies such as CISCO are using online games to engage their attendees. TED is so successful at creating community with its attendees (both live and virtual) that the attendees themselves are creating and managing their own TEDx events. A design key to building community at events is unrelenting engagement before, during and after. Resistance is futile. Passive attendance will not change the world.

One game, or meeting, can indeed change everything.