Newsletter 8 2008

Congress Center

After nine eventful days, the 2008 Ideas Park closed its doors on Sunday

Over 290,000 people visited Germany’s biggest technology experience at the Stuttgart Exhibition Center. “The Ideas Park was a resounding success. We clearly exceeded the target of 250,000 we had set ourselves for visitors,” said Dr. Ekkehard Schulz, Executive Board Chairman of ThyssenKrupp AG. “Our enthusiasm for technology proved infectious. We need to carry this enthusiasm over into our everyday lives: at home, school, work, university and not least in government. Germany needs technology and qualified engineers, scientists and skilled workers to master the challenges of the future.”
Given the drastic shortage of specialists, we need to get people interested in science and technology at an early age, he continued. The aim of motivating young people to embrace technology can only be achieved if all forces of society work together. “We achieved that aim in Stuttgart,” said Schulz. Overall more than 120 partners from the worlds of government, science, research, education and the media were involved in the Ideas Park.
Some 500 engineers, researchers and students presented their ideas and displayed the latest technologies in Stuttgart. 200 exhibits, many of them interactive, gave visitors the opportunity to find out about technology and try it out for themselves. In “SchlauLoPolis” – the city of education – children and young people found that learning more about technology and science is fun. Taking up an entire exhibition hall, more than 6,300 workshop places for all age groups offered youngsters the opportunity to experiment, invent and design for themselves. In the IdeasWorkshop, Germany’s biggest future workshop, young people collected their ideas for the future and then took to the “SchlauLoPolis” stage for a direct dialogue with experts from science and government.
Over half a million people have now visited the Ideas Park. Following Gelsenkirchen in 2004, Hanover in 2006 and the success in Stuttgart, the initiative will be continued. “In 2011 ThyssenKrupp will be 200 years old. To mark this anniversary, the next Ideas Park will be held in 2011 in North Rhine-Westphalia,” announced Schulz.

Further information at: www.ics-stuttgart.de

Focus on sustainability at DüsseldorfCongress

As a company, DüsseldorfCongress is part of society, so its sees one aspect of its mission in exercising social and environmental responsibility. With a whole raft of measures DüsseldorfCongress ensures that event operations and its day-to-day business activities are conducted with the greatest possible respect for its environment.
When it comes to logistics and transport, in collaboration with Messe Düsseldorf the venue operator has for years endeavoured to achieve greater use of local public transport by visitors travelling to and from its events – for example by offering cut-price ‘combi tickets’. And just recently DüsseldorfCongress purchased two natural gas driven vehicles (NGVs) to make its own events-related logistics more sparing on the environment.
But in the events industry the most important environmental protection factor is energy. Here, DüsseldorfCongress implements a variety of measures to make certain that energy procurement and consumption in the new venues runs efficiently and sustainably. All in all, energy consumption in the CCD Congress Center Düsseldorf, for instance, has been reduced in the past years by 23 percent – despite a 36 percent increase in capacity utilisation.
One reason for this is the use of state of the art heat generation and air-conditioning technologies. What is more, DüsseldorfCongress is currently preparing for the introduction of solar panels to generate electricity and heat water. A solar-energy system will shortly be installed on the roof of the CCD Congress Center Düsseldorf.
The various environmental measures adopted by DüsseldorfCongress make an important contribution to the responsible treatment of nature and our natural resources. Striving to achieve even more for the care of our environment is an ongoing and unflagging process for the events company.

More information at: www.duesseldorfcongress.de