A friend of mine, David Nunn, is coming to the Agile-08 conference (are you?). In a lighthearted reply to asking David if he’s going to visit our booth, David pointed out that he’ll come by… if we have some fun schwag.

Which got me thinking about schwag. My own experience is that most schwag is just future landfill—crappy metal cars or dice with LEDs that light up when rolled paid through marketing budgets that could be better spent on actually determining what problems customers need solving and how to best solve them. Oh, sure, some schwag is better than others—clothing, pens, and mugs work for me, as I can actually use them. And yes, my kids like to play with some of the schwag I’ve gotten at conferences (best ever? a very large stuffed bulldog that Mack trucks gave away at the 2003 American Trucking Association annual conference is still a favorite for one of my sons). But, this is rare, and most schwag strikes me as the worst kind of crap—the toys break, the batteries in the LED wear down, the magic 8-ball really isn’t that helpful in making management decisions—and it all ends up in the garbage.

A better approach, and one we’re taking at Enthiosys, is to structure your booth so that visitors have the chance to actually experience how your product or service helps them solve their problems. Instead of schwag, we’re going to give you something you can actually use: knowledge. We’re going to let you experience how three of our core service offerings work together to enable you to collaborate with your customers to create superior products and services by actually creating a pair of high-tech, internet-enabled sunglasses in a collaborative booth experience in two days. We’re going to use:

• In-person Innovation Games® to identify the benefits you seek in sunglasses and the features that you think best express these benefits;
  
• In-person and onlineInnovation Games® to collaboratively prioritize these features;
  
• Agile Roadmapping to identify who wants your sunglasses and when to serve them;
  
• Business Model Framework to identify how much your future customers might be willing to pay for your sunglasses.
  

By visiting our booth, you’ll be able to learn—through your own experience—how to:

• Identify and prioritize unmet market needs through Innovation Games®
  
• How to develop a market-driven roadmap that enables product teams to bridge the gap between a single release plan and larger portfolio or corporate strategies;
  
• How to create business models that drive profit and growth
  

We think this is better than schwag. Besides, I’m pretty confident that if you really need a schwag fix other vendors with bigger marketing budgets will be happy to load you up.  

And, yes, because we’re agilists (meaning: we believe in collaboration), we’re planning on including some of our partners in this experience, so that you can fully understand how our techniques work with other tools and processes. We’ll also be looking forward to answering your questions on how our techniques can help you solve your problems.

So come, visit our booth at Agile-08. You’ll have a great time.