Creative agency Sid Lee is launching C2-MTL, a creativity-in-business conference it hopes will build Montreal’s reputation as a creative hotbed and reinvent the traditional conference experience.
To stage the May 2012 event, Sid Lee has partnered with Cirque du Soleil, HSM Global, Tourisme Montreal, and Fast Company, a content partner that will reveal its list of the 100 most creative people in business there.
C2-MTL is an “immersive event” that will emphasize the “the value of using both the left and right sides of our brains to optimize our thinking potential,” according to the agency. The conference will feature performances by Cirque du Soleil–involved in the project since its inception two years ago, and a client of Sid Lee–creativity boot camps like the ones the agency already offers, and lectures by renowned speakers including Arianna Huffington, Francis Ford Coppola and Walt Disney Group’s former CEO Michael Eisner, among others.
C2-MTL Teaser from C2-MTL on Vimeo.
C2-MTL will take place in an “innovation village” built around the New City Gas building in Griffintown, a complex that supplied gas to Montreal’s streetlights in the 1920s. The village will feature cafés, networking plazas, brainstorming areas, collective worktables, immersive exhibitions and nighttime events and parties.
For Jean-François Bouchard, president of Sid Lee and the creative mind behind C2-MTL, “creativity is no longer a distinguishing feature of the new economy; it is becoming a key management function for businesses and executives in all industries and all corners of the globe. Creativity is a critical factor for business survival in the age of globalization.”
Consequently, organizers want to ensure participants have the tools to “create an environment that stimulates the emergence of new ideas, break down interdepartmental barriers to spur creativity, develop evolutionary business models, realize the value of R&D, and foster idea-generation and risk-taking” he said in a press release.
The event was announced Monday at Sid Lee’s Montreal office with Michel Leblanc, president of the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, in attendance.
