London Tech Week Is Helping Pivot the City Into Europe’s Startup Capital

Europe’s top convention bureaus are positioning themselves more strategically as platforms for crowdsourcing and co-locating conferences in aligned industries. London & Partners is doing this at the local level by aggressively clustering London Tech Week with as many other tech conference as possible. That gives smaller events a bigger stage and access to global marketing, and it drives greater worldwide exposure around London's booming tech industry year-over-year. The inaugural London Tech Week in 2014 launched as somewhat of an experiment, developed initially as a collaboration between New York ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg and London’s mayor at the time, Boris Johnson. The two men saw an opportunity to leverage London’s burgeoning startup scene in Shoreditch’s Tech City district in East London as a catalyst for economic development for the entire capital. Primarily, they wanted to ensure that the city remained competitive with the surging European startup co