ILEA Hong Kong has been working to engage event students enrolled in the city’s masters and PHD programs as well as offering insight into the event industry for undergrads. Since the appointment of Professor Brian King, Associate Dean, School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University as an advisor to ILEA Hong Kong in student integration we have started to create suitable educational activities and bridge the divide between academia and industry.
Festival and Event Insight
Last week ILEA Hong Kong organized a tour of the Clockenflap Festival site for students from Edinburgh- Napier/ HKU Space Tourism and Festivals program, Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts and Hong Kong Polytechnic event management program. The tour was led by Martin Haigh, the man in charge of sponsorship for Magnetic Asia. Magnetic Asia is the dynamic Hong Kong born innovative group behind Clockenflap, Ticketflap, Your Mum and Neon lights festival in Singapore. Eight years ago when faced with the challenge of creating a music festival in a city with no infrastructure or support for large music festivals, Magnetic Asia decided to invent and create the services they needed to make the largest and most cutting edge festival in Hong Kong and now are branching out in Asia.
Our tour took us around a frantic hustling and bustling event site with final day preparations running everywhere. Martin explained the surprise turn in the weather (massive downpours) had forced them to bring in truckloads of gravel and sand to fill in the site where drainage was not available. He also discussed to logistical issues in dealing with four separate landlords as Clockenflap was the first event to actually use the whole of the harbor front space. Students were also enlightened hearing about the challenges of choosing suppliers in a city where no one supplier was large enough to handle the F&B of catering to crowds of 60,000.
Leadership and Guidance
ILEA president Robert Rogers CSEP was recently a guest attendee representing industry for the University of Hong Kong School of Continuing Education and Edinburgh Napier BA (Hons) in Festival and Event Management Academic Committee meeting. The program is relatively new in Hong Kong and one of the only that has a major focus on the events industry. We look forward to working with them more to create well rounded graduates with a solid foundation in what it takes to put on an event.
