
The X-Culture International Business Symposium brought together 51 X-Culture students from 15 countries across six continents who, in addition to participating in a business competition and career development program, had the chance to network, learn more about the world of international business, and meet and hear from international business scholars.
Last fall, students who participated in an educational competition during the X-Culture International Business Symposium were asked to come up with ideas for a challenge that is all-too familiar to event organizers: Prove the economic, social, and cultural impact a major event can bring to a city.
The symposium was part of the X-Culture program, which gives business students from universities around the world a chance to solve a business challenge, hosted in collaboration with the Academy of International Business Southeast Chapter Annual Conference at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri, Oct. 24–26.
Launched in 2010, the X-Culture program is designed to bridge the gap between what international business students learn in a classroom and real-world environments. Students from different countries are grouped into teams and spend months working together virtually on a solution to a challenge presented by a partner company, all while learning to navigate geographical and cultural differences — everything from time zones to languages to cultural customs.
This year, the program partnered with Maritz along with the BestCities Global Alliance to create the educational challenge for the competition — the 2030 World Congress of Dermatology, an actual conference. Each student team was assigned a BestCities destination — Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Dublin, Ireland; Cape Town, South Africa; Singapore; Copenhagen, Denmark; or Guadalajara, Mexico — and asked to submit an impact proposal demonstrating how the congress could potentially make a positive impact on that destination. Representatives from Maritz and the DMOs under the BestCities umbrella provided coaching and mentoring support to the student teams throughout the process.
Being a part of that process, said Maritz Chief Global Strategy Officer Ben Goedegebuure, who served as a judge in the competition, turned out to be as much of a learning experience for them as it was for the students.

We wanted to create a challenge for the students that would give us an insight into the impact of events.”
‘A Great Experiment’
“We wanted to create a challenge that would give us an insight,” Goedegebuure said, into the ways students perceived the potential for events to make an impact, beyond an economic one, on the host destination. According to a BestCities press release, mission accomplished. While the results varied, a few themes emerged from the students’ proposals: Events should make a positive impact on their host destinations, benefit the local community they’re hosted in and communicate that impact, and sustainability should not be an afterthought.
Both Goedegebuure and Eduardo Chaillo, Maritz’s global general manager for Latin America and founder of Global Meetings and Tourism Specialists, LLC, who also participated as a judge, said they were particularly impressed with how quickly students caught on to unraveling long-time challenges within the industry, like how to create more value for sponsors. “I thought it was pretty insightful that a group who was only just touching at the surface,” Goedegebuure said, recognized that “the narrative that you need to create to attract sponsors is not easy.”
During the symposium, students had the chance to tour Maritz headquarters in nearby Fenton, Missouri, where the Maritz team hosted an event to give the 50-plus students from around the world an example of what they could create with a career in event production and design. That opportunity, along with working closely with BestCities and the DMO partners, gave students a sense of the breadth of the industry.
“The process itself was a great experiment,” Chaillo said. “Because we always talk about the disconnect between academics and industry, I think this was a great way to bring the new players, or potential new players, in touch with the real world, from two perspectives.”

I think this [competition] was a great way to bring the new players, or potential new players, in touch with the real world.”
Piquing Curiosity
The competition also served as a discovery exercise for Maritz and the partners on how to attract the next generation to work in the events industry, a challenge that seems to have been exacerbated by the pandemic. In August 2022, Convene Deputy Editor Barbara Palmer wrote about how faculty at several hospitality schools concurred that they are seeing fewer students interested in pursuing careers in events.
According to Chaillo, engaging with them directly in this way succeeded in piquing their curiosity more deeply. “They got that this is not only about transactions and logistics — this is an industry that is a lot more than that,” he said. They understood “that it can benefit a lot of people, not only in the economic way, but in the academic and the learning and the knowledge” that is shared at events.
Within the business events community, “we are always talking about, ‘How do we get young people excited about our industry?’” Goedegebuure said. “And this, for us, was one of the things that people can get very excited about it, by creating something that was specifically for them.”
And the Winner Is…
Florida Tech university announced business major Jonathan Moore’s team, which included students from Kenya and Italy, as the winner of the educational challenge posed by Maritz and BestCities. The team represented Cape Town, and their winning argument, according to Florida Tech News, centered on how the World Congress of Dermatology would be the first-ever conference of this kind in Africa, and “how it could build its focus around the skin needs and diseases unique to the African people.”
Maritz President and CEO David Peckinpaugh congratulated all the competition participants in the Florida Tech News article. “They are an impressive group of young, up-and-coming professionals,” he said, “who will truly make a difference in the world moving forward.”
On the Web
Learn more about the X-Culture Competition at x-culture.org/competition/.