Business Model Innovation in Times of Crisis: Highway2Hybrid – A Trade Fairs Digital Transformation

The business event industry was hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within a few weeks, all trade fairs, congresses and events were cancelled in the spring of 2020 and partly replaced by video-conferencing formats as fastest possible alternative in order to reach the goals of the respective industries at least digitally. After more than a year of pandemic, many marketing and business travel budgets were forced to either be cut, frozen, or shifted into online initiatives. The crisis winners of shifted budgets were, for example, the advertising business segments of social media business networks such as LinkedIn. Trade fairs were forced to leverage digital technologies and undergo a significant transformation of their business model in order to survive. This teaching case addresses various aspects of modern live communication in the business event industry and the challenge of combining these elements with digital technologies and services to create added value