when i worked at house of blues, every so often we’d have social events with all the other people working in l.a.’s concert marketing industry. people from goldenvoice, livenation (at the time this was a separate company from house of blues), nederlander, etc. lots of people in attendance had even worked at one of the other companies prior to their current position, so to a great extent the people showing up already knew one another well anyway. the real benefit of attending such an event thus wasn’t even really to meet people from whom to gain new insight so much as to validate your own membership in the industry. i think this quintessential misunderstanding leads a great deal of “networking events” to confuse the goals they are trying to fulfill by focusing their outreach inward vs. extending it out. (intra-industry vs. intER-industry).

last week i went to twiistup, an event for “mingling with other techies in a lively atmosphere of tunes, videos and inspiration.” i am not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, and i actually hate mingling (mingling is like the thing cows do in the holding pens on the way to the slaughterhouse. they… mingle.) so mostly i was going for the “inspiration.”

in an interview with entrepreneur.com, john c. head III dean of MIT’s sloan school of management, and david s. evans, vice chairman of LECG europe and visiting professor at the university college in london, co-authors of the Catalyst Code, talk about one of the most profitable business models in today’s economy, the “catalyst business”:

You ask yourself, Are there two groups you can profit from getting together? A catalyst business serves two or more distinct groups of people who benefit from interacting with each other, but need help to do so efficiently.

this kind of perspective for hybridity and creative collaborations speaks very much to the kinds of opportunities that all the inward-focused networking events are missing. as a marketer, what piqued my interest in twiistup wasn’t about the latest, most obscure, soon to be hip, “underground” apps or widgets or whatevers, but rather the reasoning behind their creation. what, exactly, about this particular app or widget or whatever did the creator consider relevant enough to the current social climate to warrant all the time invested into its creation? you don’t need to be a techie to appreciate that question, but what i discovered is that unlike “what does this do?” or “how does this work?” in an environment teeming with people creating products that beg the question, the answers are in notoriously short supply to “why does it matter?”

schmalensee says:

I don’t want to put down technology guys, because somebody has to make the idea work, but at the end of the day, the creativity comes not in writing the code, it comes in seeing the business model and thinking it through from a business point of view.

The key is not that you have to be an expert in the technology, but you have to not be afraid of it. You have to not say “Oh, I’ll never understand that”….Where you make the money [is] not in the new “gee whiz,” but what the new “gee whiz” can do for people.

part of the problem is that it’s not always so simple to see the forest in the context of an outside perspective when you’re in the thick of the overgrowth. being so mired in the details makes articulating the thing’s overall relevance much more difficult. this is then ever more reason why “networking” events should reach out to a broader range of industries. it’s not simply that non-technologists can benefit from overcoming the tech-phobia, it’s that everyone can benefit–that is, catalyst strategies are born—from overcoming industry xenophobia.

evans says there are probably more opportunities to start catalyst businesses now than ever before and proposes the reason for this is that many of the elements that you need to start a catalyst business (i.e. communications technology) have become easier to get. but i would argue there is another, just as powerful force involved here: culture.

in the rise of the creative class richard florida presents the idea that there is a distinct demographic segment, comprised of knowledge workers, intellectuals and various types of artists, with its own particular predispositions and proclivities. beyond just the nature of their occupations, this “creative class” is also defined through commonalities in many of its members’ lifestyles and values. i think there are two particular ways in which the attributes of this expanding cohort relate–not coincidentally–to the kind of business model evans and schmalensee see expanding as well:

1. the creative class grows through the very processes that catalyst-businesses enable. the creative field of technology merged with the creative field of music, develops whole new fields within music/audio technology. likewise with technology and art, and so on.

2. this group (which fills about 12% of all U.S. jobs) is disproportionately responsible for the development of the contemporary cultural landscape, passing on the very values of hybridity that fuel the catalyst-business model to industries and fields beyond just the creative class itself.

evans and schmalensee might say that what connects a fashion designer and a web entrepreneur, is that, for instance, the former would need the latter to stay competitive in their online presence, but that’s just scratching the tip of the iceberg.

what industries of all creative flavors have in common is the necessity to take the significance of cultural trends into consideration. whether you are working in technology, music, design, marketing, entertainment, business, or really anything else where what’s going on in the greater culture matters, then being able to accurately distill, develop, and disseminate cultural relevance can mean the difference between success and failure. literally. is there anything successful that WASN’T relevant to its time?

(….ok, van gogh is coming to mind…. but i’m telling you: it’s a short–posthumous–list.)

it seems then that a good way to avoid a fate of irrelevance would be to explore the directions that the industries driving culture in tandem with yours are leading culture. a great forum for jus such an exploration (on any scale) is a “networking” event.

for the creative class, culture is the raw material ALL of us work with, and all of us have a hand in shaping different aspects of it. it’s why the answers to the “why does it matter?” question are so important to me, and should probably be to you too. one of the goals for any significant networking event aiming to provide value to this particular yet disparate demographic segment then, should be to apply this approach towards a greater industry hybridity.