Copenhagen Legacy Lab: Building Lasting Impacts in Denmark

The 54th European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, which took place in June 2022 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen

Gerda-Marie Rist (on the right), Head of the Copenhagen Legacy Lab, reflects on how the Lab has evolved since its launch in 2019, including key achievements, legacy processes from congresses and major events, and Copenhagen’s new All Inclusive strategy to drive meaningful, long-term impact for the city and its partners.

In 2019, we explored the Legacy Lab project during the BestCities Forum in Copenhagen. Nearly five years later, what updates have you made to the legacy framework based on your work with associations and congresses?

Since the launch of Copenhagen Legacy Lab in 2019, we have executed 13 major legacy processes in close collaboration with the congress organisations. We have also conducted an extensive study on nine congresses together with MeetDenmark, which was published in 2023. This has provided us with a lot of experience, and we are continuously adjusting our method, tools, and templates according to our observations. In collaboration with consultants and a national economist, we have dug deeper into methods of measuring the output, outcomes, and impacts, which have strengthened the tools we had available. Recently, we have included major events (e.g., sports events) in our legacy framework and adjusted our congress model slightly to have one model that can accommodate both areas.

In our work, we acknowledge the importance of having a strategic framework that helps us work systematically and focused. Not two legacy processes are the same. We constantly adjust the process to fit the concrete case, as these can vary in scope, content, and execution. However, one very important factor, which we invariably put time and effort into, is to discuss ‘the why’. Why are we engaged in this legacy initiative; what is the underlying problem, and which change do we want to see in the long run after the congress? Having this dialogue with the relevant stakeholders and allowing time for this phase of the process is sometimes challenging but always time well spent. Also, it helps us to plan the evaluation phase properly and set up the right measuring parameters. We are currently exploring whether and how AI can contribute to the early stages of our legacy process, identifying the right stakeholders and suggesting relevant legacy areas.

The Copenhagen Legacy Lab follows a strategic process aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Which sectors have shown the most significant potential legacies, and how has the local community benefited?

Our legacy initiatives focus on three of Copenhagen’s prioritised strongholds: life science, green transition, and information and communications technology. While all sectors can benefit from working with a legacy process, we have seen the greatest impacts in health and green transition.

Within life science, the sector with most congresses coming to Copenhagen, typical focus areas for legacy have been patient involvement, talent attraction, and education. The patient days have been very well received, and several congresses are incorporating the concept of a patient day in their congress programme as a standard. For example, the European Society for Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition held a Family Education Day at their congress in Copenhagen in 2022, where around 30 families were invited to meet the experts and obtain new knowledge about their child’s disease, as well as exchange experiences with other affected families.

As an example from green transition, we were involved in developing the ‘Copenhagen Lessons’ during the International Union of Architects (UIA) congress in 2023. These ten principles will create a common language to accelerate sustainable change in the built environment.

Another angle that has proven very valuable is our work with the associations to help them sharpen their impact and adjust their ways of working. The Global DIY-Summit 2022 (pictured below) legacy activity focused on creating a more responsible and sustainable DIY industry, resulting in annual reporting of the external Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance initiatives from various manufacturers and retailers within the industry. We also worked with the Nordic Blockchain Congress 2023 and facilitated the identification of four key challenges in this industry, and established four steering groups focusing on these issues.
 

For the 2024 ISA SUP and Paddleboard World Championship, Copenhagen Legacy Lab worked with Surf & SUP Danmark and 19 Danish tourist boards. What were the event’s main objectives, and how was the strategic alignment realised?

Before the world championship, we analysed the link between stand-up paddleboarding (SUP) and outdoor tourism and found that Denmark had a large potential for developing SUP among tourists. We developed a national SUP universe in collaboration with Surf & SUP Danmark, VisitDenmark, and the 19 Danish tourist boards.

To further increase the engagement of the tourist boards, they were asked to be involved in a pre-tour hosted by Surf & SUP Danmark. Many of the boards welcomed the idea of having a tour to visit their region, and the early dialogue enabled us to match the tour plan directly to local and existing water sports events. Merging the pre-tour with local events was a clear win-win situation.

Following the successful WindEurope 2023 congress, the association will return to Copenhagen for its annual event in 2025, the 7th time it has chosen the city. Given Denmark’s role as a pioneer in wind energy, this is an opportunity further to build legacies around innovation, energy, and sustainability. Has any pre-event planning been done, and what are the strategic objectives and potential impacts for both WindEurope and Copenhagen?

We have been fortunate to work with WindEurope for several years, which enables us to work consistently with legacy and build on our previous measures. WindEurope has focused on the involvement of school children and early talent attraction in Copenhagen and other locations, targeting the workforce gap within the wind industry, which will only increase with time. Denmark is among the leading countries in terms of the education of schoolchildren within the wind area. For example, Copenhagen Municipality has educated schoolchildren through the Greater Copenhagen Living Lab in Energy & Water public-private partnership for many years. With the upcoming legacy initiative for 2025, which we are currently working closely with WindEurope to prepare, we will be able to reach even more local families and children, and not least to inspire other countries to do the same.
 

Last year, you launched a risk assessment white paper to identify key threats in the sector, highlighting concerns such as travel restrictions, technological infrastructure, inflexible contracts, and regional instability. Has this influenced legacy building with your clients? And does the risk assessment play a role in your legacy methodology?

The risk project has not yet directly influenced our legacy methodology or our ability to collaborate with clients and stakeholders. However, it has helped us reflect on risks in our legacy processes and, not least, the long-term effects. Risks associated with pre- and during-event activities will typically be tied to resources, mandates, commitment, time and funding. More long-term risks can be sectoral changes, strategic priority adjustments, lack of funding, change of leadership, challenges in data and many more. With increased experience with legacy processes, we have become more skilled at risk mitigation.

The updated Copenhagen Sustainability Guide helps reduce CO2 emissions and event resource consumption. Has the guide influenced your partners to consider event legacies, and is it changing the approach to your supply chain?

We are updating the Copenhagen Sustainability Guide to a more comprehensive tool, strongly aligned with our new strategy, ‘Copenhagen All Inclusive’ and our commitments to Net Zero Carbon Events. From a legacy point of view, we hope that the inclusion in the guide will inspire associations to consider working strategically with impact/legacy together with us. Our ambition is for more associations to understand better the enormous potential their events can have economically, environmentally, and socially.

Among the various case studies you have worked on, have there been instances where the outcomes or impacts (social, environmental, educational, or economic) deviated from the original framework used to design and measure them? Were there any surprising legacies or impacts that were not foreseen? If so, does serendipity play a role in the legacy-building process?

A legacy process rarely results in a straightforward outcome easily defined by an easily measured KPI. We try to think the process through to the evaluation phase and to measure what we find most relevant, but often, we can add excellent outcomes as add-ons that we could not imagine from the start. For example, we recently worked with the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) in connection with the World News Media Congress 2024 in Copenhagen. By coincidence, we met a Danish journalist working with news avoidance among Generation Z, and this ended up in a successful legacy initiative involving a workshop with 70 international students from the Danish Folk School in Elsinore and 12 congress delegates. The resulting ‘Copenhagen Criteria’, 7 News Values to guide the development of journalistic products for young generations, have been spread around the globe to inspire news editors to target young audiences in new ways. Enlightened democracies require various groups of people, including the young generations, to participate in political decisions and the news environment. So, while we can measure the spread of the News Values and how they are used to educate new journalists, etc., what is most important is that we are targeting a potential democratic problem with this legacy initiative.

What steps should the MICE industry take to promote better knowledge sharing and collaboration between destinations and associations? Are there any inspiring examples that have shaped Copenhagen’s own legacy journey?

Showing concrete examples of how legacy has impacted our society makes it more tangible to understand, but a focused communication effort remains and is on our list of important wins for the years to come.

Our legacy road has been collaborative from the outset across Denmark and internationally. We chose early on to go ‘open source’ and to share research, case tools with the MICE industry – not only as an inspiration but also to support a transition in our industry. We strongly believe we can only succeed if we work together and share. Many steps have been taken already to secure this path. There are many excellent, inspirational examples of legacy and impact work that has been done, such as JMIC/ICEBERG, BestCities, ICCA, IMEX, Meet4Impact, UTS/Business Events Sydney, JBEL and so many destinations that have now created their own models for working with impact and legacy.

Wonderful Copenhagen recently launched its new strategy, All Inclusive, which moves from a narrow focus on revenue to a focus on broad, lasting impacts. With this, legacy is adopted as a strategic cornerstone of our organisation’s way of working. I think this is highly motivating and sparks hope for the broad implementation of legacy, serving as a potential game changer for lasting impact across the globe.