Joris Beckers (Love Tomorrow) & Mats Raes (Love Tomorrow/The Impact Circle): Festival to innovation

0:00Andreas Munk Holm:Quick one dear friends, before we start make sure to switch on video. We're running footage from Tomorrowland and the Love Tomorrow Summit alongside this and you absolutely need to see it. 75 ,000 people a day living inside what Joris describes as a hyper-compressed city of the future. The same energy, water, waste and logistics challenges as any major metropolis but all compressed into one weekend and rebuilt from scratch every year. Today's guests turned that into an open innovation platform and then they added smart capital. That is the story that we're here to explore when we talk about the future.

0:30Andreas Munk Holm:about Love Tomorrow and the Impact Circle. Welcome to the podcast.

0:36Andreas Munk Holm:This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Guys, before we dive super deep in, I just want you both to explain to the audience how Tomorrowland goes from being a big music festival, the leading music festival, I think many would say, to becoming Love Tomorrow and stuff about impact. Well, maybe first I present myself. So I'm Joris, father of four kids and I have a lovely wife living in Belgium. And I had already quite some experience in the entertainment world, going from director of a ticketing company from a venue and tour manager of the musical Romeo and Juliet.

1:21and in 2005, together with some friends, we had the idea to start up a festival in the most difficult country for organizing a festival because we are famous for our big festivals, Werishter, Pükelpop, Graspop, Dur. And they existed at the time already many years, but still we thought that we could do it different, not better, but different. That's where it all started with Tomorrowland. The rest is a bit of history. So 21 years later, we organized our festival with many people, two weekends. And we do festivals all around the world. And not only the Tomorrowland festivals, but the less known.

2:06But soon they will become very known. The core festivals, two weekends ago, we did one in L.A. We're going a bit everywhere in the world with this smaller festival. I had many opportunities in the period that I worked for Tomorrowland, starting up Dreamville, our campsite in 2009. We started with Love Tomorrow in 2013. And we will go deeper in this subject later on, I suppose, Andreas. Then I also started with the foundation in 2016. And with the foundation, we've built already four schools around the world. And then we opened a desert resort during COVID in Dubai called Terra Solis. So that's a bit what I do.

2:49And my daily business for our tasks for Tomorrowland is that I'm responsible. I'm head of public affairs. I'm head of Love Tomorrow. And I'm head of all the strategic festival real estate that we need to be able to organize the festivals. Yes. So I'm part of the Love Tomorrow team. We will talk more about how it came to be, but I'm responsible for organizing of tomorrow's summit, which is our top leadership festival, and then also leading the Impact Circle team. So we will talk more later. And to also answer your question, Andreas, I think in 2014 or 2013, you can explain more. I wasn't in the company yet, but it became very successful in many ways.

3:34And then I think we asked a question, Joris, maybe you can add to that. what does it mean to be a successful festival? And also from your public affairs perspective, we then launched Love Tomorrow as a CSR program. We didn't call it a CSR program, we called it the philosophy at first. So yeah, many years later, we now have this full Love Tomorrow playbook in place. You were there, Jois. Who was around the table in 2014 asking this question? Nobody. No, so Andreas, maybe I have to go to the question, because I can imagine that people and yourself, that you think like coming from a festival, how the hell do you get them to a Love Tomorrow program?

4:24Andreas Munk Holm:I was just about to say we're of course involved and doing stuff together on stage for Love Tomorrow. And that's the question that I've gotten from all the people I've invited. And then once they understood the context that I would absolutely love to come. But a lot of them said, what's the connection here? Why are you doing Love Tomorrow together with Tomorrowland? How does this tie in corporate innovation, startups, venture, impact and a big festival? What's the story here? Don't be mistaken by the festival vibe. So we are very serious entrepreneurial people, of course. That's also how we became this mass festival and entertainment company.

4:59And then to understand, we understood quite fast we are very good at bringing people together and also celebrating successes. So within the Love Tomorrow strategy, we chose those two focus areas to develop our ecosystem at first and then to also inspire and become a thought leader on these topics that are close to Love Tomorrow. Then secondly, we understood that if we really want to achieve long-term impact, we need to broaden the ecosystems to governments, large corporates, and then of course also investors. So that's how the Impact Circle came to be two or three years ago. The initial idea was on the table, and now we will be organizing our second edition of the Impact Circle next summer.

5:41So yeah, being a mass festival organizer also allows us, let's say an atypical way, to bring people together, to do business in a more informal way, but also be very serious about the outcomes still. So I think that answers the question partly. But it's still, we have to explain in every meeting we have, we have to explain why is Tumorland organizing, let's say, an innovation network. For us, I think in short, it's really, if we look back in 10 years, we can say we invested a lot of money ourselves and tried to mitigate challenges, innovation challenges, sustainability challenges. But we are convinced that if we do this with an open mindset, working together in a larger ecosystem, we can achieve a lot more.

6:21So that is really the basis of why we do Love Tomorrow and Impact Circle specifically. So Mats, I think that you go maybe a bit too fast. No, you don't go too fast. You go very fast because people also want to know more in detail how we arrived at the point of starting with the idea of Love Tomorrow and what we want to achieve. I think that's also a bit, the idea of the podcast is to create this context or to explain a bit the context. So what people need to know is that, because unfortunately not everybody in the world is aware of Tomorrowland, but we're not just a three-day party over two weekends.

7:05It's a hyper-compressed kind of city where more than 75 ,000 residents per day are living. It's kind of a city where we have exactly the same challenges as many major cities. The energy grid, water treatment. Of course, we produce massive waste streams. We have a quite complex logistic system. We have to deal with crowd management. And so you see all these kind of challenges are almost the same than a major city has. So in the beginning, during the traditional CSR phase, we thought like, how can we clean up this city as good as possible? But the real shift happened really, really when we turned that famous question that we had at the time into if we can build this kind of city from scratch, can we not build it then immediately from the right way where it will become an ultimate circular city of the future?

8:20That was my idea. We still have that goal. So in 2030, we want to be that famous festival that looks like the most circular city of the future. And a normal city challenges very slow or very slow because of regulations, because of bureaucracy. We have the DNA that we can change things in a few weeks or in a certain limited of time. so it's a kind of a how do i experience it it's like a high speed uh micro society that's how i

8:58Andreas Munk Holm:experience it do you so do you leverage it as such do you leverage it to implement every year new societally much more sound solutions and say how can we use this as an experimentarium for city development outside of the love tomorrow context and tomorrowland context Definitely. Yeah, that's what we're aiming for. And that's what we're trying to do. And that's also our contribution to the society. And maybe we'll have the time to mention some examples later on. But at a certain moment, we also realized that it was not longer a marketing tool anymore. Love Tomorrow. It became, like Mats was already explaining, it became kind of a transformation platform.

9:47It gave us a very good feeling the moment that some, and I can say major corporate partners like energy companies, big brewers, our partner at Inbev, and waste management firms that approached us. and they stopped talking to the, not only talking to the partnership department of Tomorrowland to have a logo on the stage, but they also started talking to our Love Tomorrow teams or team, the sustainability team. And they wanted to know how can we now make the newest, the untested technology work under those festival extreme pressure environment. So we notice that pilots that we run at the festival grounds, like, for example, decentralization, energy, circular materials, water-saving measures, we're getting a lot of attention from the outside world after the festival.

10:55Every year, we try to push our boundaries is always further and further and we want to stop just compensating for our enormous footprint but refocus more on redesigning the system or the systems that we have beforehand that's a complete different mind shift that we have that we had to go through so many of these famous or less famous deep tech and these impact startups, they often, they don't have the possibility. And the result is also that they fail maybe because they only test their new ideas, technologies in styroli and university labs or in small scale pilots. they miss the real world with real unpredictable citizens or customers or however you call them.

11:57So we offer those startups a massive and a super interesting audience of people who didn't come. That's very important. They didn't come to be sustainable because they came to party. They came out of an escapism philosophy. So that makes it even more special and more challenging. So a circular, for example, a circular cup or a water-saving shower or a new type of food packaging, if that survives in those circumstances where alcohol is around, mud is around, people are in a hurry and there is a mass usage of these products, then there is a big possibility that it also survives somewhere else. And I'm almost at the end.

12:52By facilitating this ultimate stress, we call it actually a stress test. We can drastically shorten the time to market for some of the companies. And of course, it's not always a success story. But what we see and experience is that the time to market is shorter because of this experience that we gave them. So that is not just kind of a charity, but it's value creation that we do. So Love Tomorrow, we evolved from an internal initiative into an open innovation platform. So we saw that we could scout and test innovation, but we're missing one crucial link. And Andreas, maybe you can guess what is our missing crucial link in this whole story to create real worldwide impact with Love Tomorrow?

14:00Andreas Munk Holm:Well, I'm sure it's the capital that's always the missing piece. It's the smart capital, exactly. We have the testing grounds with Tomorrowland, with our campsite Dreamville. We have these startups, but to help those startups to scale up to the rest of Euro, we had to build a bridge to an institutional investor and venture capital. So that is actually, and Mats, maybe you can continue or you can complete my words, that's actually why we started with the impact circle. And I guess just to add one note to that, and I think this is also very much an expression of where the European ecosystem is, it's not just the capital from investors, it's also the capital from large-scale buyers.

14:52Andreas Munk Holm:And that's why, of course, Love Tomorrow very much focuses and the impact circle very much focuses on corporates. And it's a massive problem and a massive pull. We're seeing it from the VC side as well. VCs constantly getting in touch with the corporates that we work with because they're trying to figure out how can we get our startups in there. And I think it's the exact right focus of the impact circle as well. Mats, please take it from here. Yeah, as you just explained, it's all about how can we catalyze open innovation, I think. And then we chose to work with these large corporates, the power of scale.

15:25We also believe that it's not only about our challenges, it's also about their challenges. So we have this mutual set of challenges defined all together. This year, we will have 12 large corporates joining us, both from European corporates and outside of European corporates. For example, YITRO, Japanese trade organization, will also join us with some of the Japanese leading corporates. So yeah, we put together these mutual challenges. Then we have a collaboration with the EIC, the European Innovation Council. They have a program called the Corporate Partnership Program. So it kind of has the same objective as the impact circle, but then obviously with a different perspective.

16:03We became one of their hero events throughout the year. They host a lot of open innovation days with large corporates. So similar playbook as ours. The difference, of course, is that we bring together so many corporates at the same time. So we have four to five months of preparation, defining the challenges, selecting the startups. So there's already a lot of stress tests before the events happen. So that's also quite unique. We're very curated in that sense. Impact Circle is also an invite-only event. So that allows us to really stress test, again, the challenges of bringing together the right people.

16:39To make sure in summer we have a culmination, like a boot camp, all together with a lot of pitching. And then the real work starts, of course, because then the venture clienting process continues. So on the long term, hopefully in 10 years, we'll be able to resolve some of our challenges and also the mutual challenges with the corporate. So that is kind of our playbook.

17:01Andreas Munk Holm:Joris, you told us just before how you're using your festival grounds as the perfect place for innovations to be tested and starters to put their innovations into work. The impact circle and love tomorrow is not purely for those that have applications that work in your context of a festival. Let's just touch on that and make that super clear to everyone. How broad you go? What's the criteria for what you're looking for as attendees? What's the criteria you look for when it comes to startups? How does all of this work? Mas, you can answer on this one. So I'll give an example. Last year with ESA, European Space Agency, we also launched a call.

17:41So we had a lot of calls on autonomous mobility. We believe that mobility is one of the biggest challenges for a festival like Tomorrowland. like Tomorrowland. We have a lot of international visitors, more than 100 nationalities in Belgium alone. So how can we fix this? We need ecosystems. If you look at aviation, we need to work together with Uftanza. We need to work together with Brussels Airport, etc. But then we also asked the ESA community to try and help us with those challenges. So that is an example, a very tangible example. We're now piloting some of those ideas. So I think that is a good example.

18:14Also in the field of energy, we're looking at generating less festivals. So we will be launching a call together this summer. We have Gulp as a Southern European company hosting this challenge together with us. And then on a longer term, we can find the right technologies. We can find the right level of investment to come up with real solutions and not just mitigating, let's say, negative impact. Maybe people think now that all the startups that we work with, that we give them the test ground at Dreamville or at Tomorrowland. But that's not the case. So we work with many startups. But in case one of their innovations can be tested at our test grounds, then we can give them the possibility.

19:01If not, then they get a test ground maybe in one of the major companies that we work with within the impact circle. But then it's not any more tested at our test grounds.

19:12Andreas Munk Holm:I actually think that that's a great way to tie the two together because everyone can understand how your festival grounds can be used for someone doing circular cups, as an example, or whatever. But the same requirement that you have for yourself, saying that we're doing this with startups to give them a testing ground, you have the same requirement for the corporates that engage with you. So that the corporates that come into your program and are admitted into the impact circle are corporates that are saying we're ready to work with startups. We're ready to take in their projects to help our own innovation, but also to help those startups progress their own work.

19:53Andreas Munk Holm:I think that's super important. I think it's a great example of because you spent some time sharing exactly how you're doing it in your system, in your context. But, of course, when you then have your partners in the impact circle doing the same thing, you can imagine how this really works. Exactly. Last year, you had 73 startups across seven circles. is, of course, a massively, you described it before, Matt, as calls. So you're doing these innovation calls for startups to pitch in on different solutions, so to say that the challenges are coming from the corporates. So in other words, you're hitting much more than the 73 that are accepted into it.

20:32Andreas Munk Holm:But you're, of course, only taking in those where there's a really good match between the problem that the corporate challenge is about and then the solution that the startups can provide. Can you talk a bit about the magic that happens here and a bit about the process that everyone goes through? The reason why they need to do it is because they have client venturing purposes. So a lot of the corporates we met, we met, I think, 40 to 50 corporates only the last years. So it's always interesting to see is the venture clienting model already developed internally, yes or no. It's quite challenging for a lot of large corporates.

21:08So the first parameter is always their willingness to invest, not only from a CVC perspective, but really client venturing perspective. And then secondly, the magic that happens. So we launched the calls somewhere in March. Then we have support from the EIC and their agency. So we have DealFlow is an agency. Also Hello Tomorrow is a second agency working on the CBP program. So again, they support us. EIC support us in value and kind, managing these deal flow processes. So for me, what I see at other events, often it's very spontaneous. It's very interesting to meet people at conferences. But the big difference is here that we already start working six months ahead or four months ahead, depending on each of the circles.

21:52They are being coached. The starts apart being coached. There's already reverse pitching. The experts within the companies are already involved. So the due diligence before the event is already very strong. So this allows us in summer. Last year we only had one circle within consumer goods executing this playbook. This year we will have six. So consumer goods, food, media and entertainment, etc. So last year the hit rate on the pilots that are now being executed is very high. So we had 34 startups. We have now eight or nine pilots being developed or already executed. So that's more than 30%. So that kind of proves my point.

22:31if we can multiply this, then we're heading in the right direction. And then, of course, it will always be important to kind of, let's say from a philosophical perspective, to guide the impact circle in the right direction. But in the second year, we're already doing quite good. So I hope more large corporations join, policymakers join on a smaller scale, but they're, of course, also very important for regulation, etc. Also funding capabilities in the public funding space. and then of course VCs for momentum, for scaling. So yeah, that's why we're here today.

23:06Andreas Munk Holm:Guys, I would love the two of you to just tie the knot between this magical fact that you have 7 ,000 people coming together for love tomorrow and at the same time you have the impact circle happening where there's been this big process ahead of time finding the best startups, finding the corporates that are actually ready to take in founders working on important problems and innovations. and then what's happening on those stages during these Love Tomorrow days. I fell in love when I heard about the concept of how you do it, but I want our audience to do so as well. So share a bit how you're doing it.

23:40Well, Mats, you are in the best position because you are our Summit and Impact Circle director. So I think that you have now to sell the two concepts that you created. Yeah, so first and foremost, the fact that we can use a festival venue like Tomorrowland for the leadership festival is like a real USP. A lot of people claim USPs each and every day, but no one else in the world can use a festival site like Tomorrowland. There's millions of euros invested each year again, so it's one of the most beautiful festival grounds of the world. The fact that we can use this for a CSR, let's say, inspired event is amazing.

24:17So Love Tomorrow at first is a hybrid event, so we have a B2B audience, yes, but primarily a B2B audience, but also we have other visitors. So we have a lot of societal topics being programmed on four to five stages. And then we have two, three B2B oriented stages, for example, on venturing, entrepreneurial activism, et cetera. And then we have these beautiful matchmaking areas on site. We even have a Ferris wheel where we host a matchmaking event throughout the day. So again, no one else in the world can say that, I think, more or less. So yeah, that's what we try to do with Love Tomorrow. really having societal playbook first and then the ideas and the entrepreneurial ideas they follow after that.

25:01And Impact Circle is really very serious on business outcomes and innovation outcomes. So that is like strict B2B play. So that's, I think, the biggest difference between both.

25:10Andreas Munk Holm:If I should put in my advertising, I would say I think what Europe truly needs is a set of events that are much more well produced than the current ones that exist. I am deliberately, when I do events with the UVC, I'm deliberately keeping it small because I don't think I have what it takes to be able to do it mass scale and make it special. I always say there's one place that brings together thousands and thousands of people every single day and none of us want to go there. And that's Walmart or Lidl or whatever. Mention any big retailer where you absolutely do not want to spend any time. I kind of feel like most of the tech conferences have gotten to be similar to that.

25:59Andreas Munk Holm:There's a bunch of people there. You have no idea who is. And most of them you have no reason to have meaningful engagement with. and it's not done in a place where you want to be. I think you have every single thing that you need to be able to do something completely different. And I think you're both representing it so well here. Joris, I want to leave the final word to you. That was my short advertising. Tell the audience just what they have in store for them if they choose to come to Love Tomorrow or engage with the Impact Circle. Well, to come to the Love Tomorrow Summit, well first of all it's worth it to come because the programmation is really interesting and like what like in Mats was already explaining it's for everybody there is something super interesting in a programmation as we all know is always very challenging to program a summit that all of the speakers that we have that we program are interesting for all the visitors That's impossible.

27:04So that's why we have these different stages. And it goes from well-being to innovation to sport, even sports, meditation, thought leadership. So I think that what we have in our hands with the summit is a tool where we can bring the subject sustainability closer to our audience, to the people coming to the summit. It's very accessible. Most of the speakers are very accessible. We give some tips and tricks to people attending the summit that they can take home and apply in their daily life. So that is, for me, the summit. then the impact circle well Andreas thank you very much the way you described it before I think that we have a tool in our hands where intimacy is very important which means that people can connect very easily it's a compact group, it's a well selected group, there is a goal, a common goal for many of those people that are attending the impact circle and it's on a European scale, so that is I think the biggest difference between the summit and the impact circle.