Within the last year I’ve had an opportunity to attend four different medical conventions as part of the support team for projects we’ve created for our clients. Before my travels to these events, I’d spent most of my time behind the screen, programming the touchscreen kiosks and interactive stations that line the booths that are usually prevalent at these types of meetings.

Seizing the opportunity, at each of these conventions I made it a point to take in the variety of interactive experiences that were being used at all of the other exhibitor’s booths. Partway into the second convention, while once again taking in all the interactive attractions, it hit me. There was a lot of keeping-up-with-the-Jones’ going on between the various companies and brands but very little true innovation. Status quo was the norm and any unique or out-of-the-box thinking on how to engage conference attendees was rare if not altogether non-existent.

In recent years the industry has had to shift away from being able to hand out a bevy of marketing items that used to cause such a frenzy when convention centers opened there doors. The throngs of attendees turned temporary tchotchke-hunters were now being redirected back towards the original mission of these conferences: dissemination and access to value-added product information. In the wake of the fallen conference tchotchke market, it seems that all that remains are the ravenous sales reps and their clipboards, ready to dive upon any conference attendee that dares to venture into their exhibits. Well, the reps and their ho-hum touchscreens and video walls anyways.

It goes without saying that our industry has an extensive amount of legal limitations and FDA restrictions, but that should really not dictate how far outside the box that innovation is allowed to wander. It leads me to wonder how often ideas are squashed based on the assumption that legal will nix them before they have a chance to grow any legs.

Now is the time for innovation. As conferences and exhibitors are still settling into ever more stringent rules and regulations on what they can say and hand out, there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the exhibition booth that few companies are taking advantage of.

A lot of the opportunity lies in creating a toe-dipping experience for attendees. Engage them with self-guided interactive stations that are engineered to entertain and educate (otherwise referred to as edutainment) with interactive experiences that ultimately evolve into a conversation where the sales reps and product experts get involved.

In the age of the Internet’s anonymous access to nearly unlimited knowledge, creating booth experiences that can bridge the gap between self-guided product explorations that users are familiar with from Web surfing with the benefit of access to qualified experts that bring much more to the table than tchotchkes is where the opportunity for innovation lies.

With self-guided edutainment as a foundational concept for the exhibition booths of the future, let the brainstorming begin.