Park MGM in Las Vegas is on to something big. Which is kind of cool for a hotel where 80 percent of group business is comprised of 100 people or less.
It all begins in the Ideation Studio, a hub of 10 intimate meeting spaces that cull from behavioral science to essentially deconstruct conditioned thinking and meeting design. Mike Dominguez, SVP and chief sales officer for MGM Resorts International, says the creativity, innovation and productivity that is being whipped up in the new Park MGM studio will position Vegas meetings in a whole new light.
“We get so infatuated with sexy versus substance. The Ideation Studio reinterprets how we interact with our environment; to light. It’s more about what flipping a switch means rather than the light it gives … rather than being talked to, it’s about making conversations happen.”
Aside from making sure the convo flows, that all in-room meeting participants can look each other in the eye, and offering right-brain attendees ample opportunities for doodling, the studio employs Cisco Webex Teams technology, a first for any hospitality company, which elevates the level of interactivity that is usually possible during strategy brainstorming sessions.
With Webex, groups of six to 24 join a room either in-person or virtually to share info across two meeting room screens, see and interact with each other and use a virtual white board for real-time collaboration. The boards are swiped clean after a set time (you decide) and all meetings live indefinitely on the Cisco servers to be accessed as needed by room participants. Finally, Ideation Studio meetings can happen simultaneously in different rooms and attendees can be added to more than one room at a time, depending on your desired access levels.
