The business events sector (meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions) faces real pressure to cut its environmental impact and adapt to shifting expectations around inclusivity and resilience, but individual organisers and destinations often lack the resources or shared frameworks to drive that change on their own.

Led by the Catalan Tourism Agency with partners including Visit Flanders, the European Tourism Futures Institute, and several other organisations across six countries, BEFuture worked on three fronts: building skills through training and co-creation workshops, publishing shared resources such as a whitepaper on new business models for the sector, and running an acceleration programme that directly supported more than 80 SME-driven projects across Europe.

The project closed in February 2026 with its practical outputs already in circulation across the sector. Three months later, it received the IMEX-EIC Innovation in Sustainability Award, presented jointly by IMEX and the Events Industry Council at IMEX Frankfurt, one of the industry's most visible platforms. For a sector still working out what sustainable transformation looks like in practice, this signals that the project's approach, and not just its EU funding, held up to outside scrutiny.

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