An analysis of the incentives of entrepreneurs for engaging in business conference visits.

In this paper the motivations of why attendees engage in business conference visit has been researched. The data has been gathered at The Next Web Conference on the 23rd and 24th of April; with the use of face-to face interviews during the conference. The data analysis explicitly focuses on 173 entrepreneur-attendees; who are shown to be different from average attendees and shown to be a heterogeneous group. The motivations are divided into pleasure-seeking motivations and professional motivations; and are constructed through factor analysis. The paper shows that entrepreneurs are goal-oriented in engaging in business conference visit and that financial weaker times do not change the number of business conferences they visit. Entrepreneurs are divided in the dataset into the classification of business experience and type of entrepreneur. This presents to be valuable to evaluate the preferences in business conference visit for them. The most important conclusion is that financial capital is the least favorable form of capital for all classifications of entrepreneurs; in particular established entrepreneurs do not value to pursue financial capital at business conferences. This information can be implemented to more efficiently organize business conferences to the needs of the entrepreneur-attendees in order to keep them satisfied and to keep them as customers.