Skip to main content
state library of queensland
Blog
Business and entrepreneurs

Jean-Francois Bouchard: The man behind C2

By Administrator | 5 December 2017

Jean-Francois Bouchard had given up on attending business conferences by the time he decided to create his own.

"Basically at some point I stopped attending business events because I thought they were awfully boring," he says. "Always set in the same generic venues serving the same plastic chicken and there was a lack of originality".

The founder and chief-executive of Canadian advertising agency Sid Lee came up with the concept for C2 in partnership with one of Canada's most famous exports, Cirque du Soleil.

"With Cirque du Soleil as a partner we thought it was possible to do something in a radically different way and something that would truly amount to an experience," Bouchard says. "Using our background in entertainment and creativity we set ourselves the ambitious goal of completely reinventing the business conference."

Bouchard says he was prepared to take the risk to fail and the first C2 was held in Montreal in 2012.

"I'm not sure we understood what we were planning for the first year, we just jumped into it in a very naive way," he says. "Thank God it worked out because it could have been a massive failure. It was basically our first event and we went from knowing nothing about this business to hosting 3000 people in a very progressive setting. It was typical entrepreneurial behaviour to jump in first and then figure out how to swim." Read more

Cara Waters - Brisbane Times - 2 Dec 2017

Comments

Your email address will not be published.

We welcome relevant, respectful comments.

Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.
We also welcome direct feedback via Contact Us.
You may also want to ask our librarians.