What the role of innovation in international Festival?

Mirko Whitfield, responsible for selling and marketing SXSW in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America explains the interest of innovation in SXSW‘s festival.

We have always had innovation in all the arts and sciences. If we didn’t life would become boring. However, many people today identify ‘innovation’ as being somehow exclusively linked to technological developments, for example the development of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter etc. However, whilst developments in technology certainly allow us to explore and create new ideas, innovation can simply be about relooking at existing ideas and reformatting them. For example, introducing new elements into an old storyline, thus creating a new film plot or online game. 

SXSW is held every year in Texas but about 20% of our delegates come from outside the USA, and at SXSW 2014 we had participants from more than 80 countries.  There were 5400 delegates from Europe, and about 1350 from the Asia-Pacific region.

In addition to the three main festivals – SXSW Music, Film and Interactive, I also work on SXSW EDU (www.sxswedu.com), the education festival which is held just before SXSWstarts, as well as V2V (www.sxswv2v.com) which is held in Las Vegas in July and which is dedicated to the ‘Start Up’ community and industries.

This year I decided that I had to come to Moscow and rAsiA.com.Plus, we have about 40 delegates from Russia at SXSW 2014, so I’m very hopeful that this number will increase next year. Finally, it is a well-known fact that many Russians have set up companies in Silicon Valley or are employed in the American IT industry, so I’m sure that many Russian entrepreneurs would be interested in visiting SXSW.