July 2013 - Parks & Recreation - 52

NRPA Update
Your Keynote Speaker: Jeremy
Gutsche, Innovation Expert
The keynote speaker for NRPA's upcoming 2013 Congress and Exposition
sees a lot of promising trends in the future of parks and recreation

eremy Gutsche has built his career around finding out what's cool before
it's cool. He is an innovation expert, founder and chief trend hunter of
TrendHunter.com, award-winning author and the 2013 NRPA Congress
and Exposition keynote speaker. What started out as a project to help him decide what career path he'd like to follow led to the creation of a website that
boasts more than 40 million views per month and a business built around inspiring new and successful business ideas.
In a time when park and recreation agencies are fighting to keep
their share of funding, the ability
to exploit trends and chaos is more
important than ever. Well aware of
the challenges that park and recre-

ation professionals face, Gutsche has
structured his keynote to help park
and rec pros use chaos to create opportunity, create a culture of innovation, utilize trend-spotting and communicate infectiously.
What did you think your career
would be before you started trend
hunting?
I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but my problem was I
couldn't actually figure out what I
wanted to do. Every career I ever
chose was really just to expose myself
to different ideas. So I started Trend
Hunter as a place where people could
come to share their business ideas.
At the time, I was running a business
line at Capital One, but when I would
come home in the wee hours of the
morning, I would start working on this
website. People from around the world
were submitting ideas, and I was hoping that one of them would inspire my
future venture. But once it started taking off, I never actually needed to pick.
So the fun thing is that now, I can just
help other people find their ideas, and
that's really what we specialize in.

Parks & Recreation

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What can you tell us about the
keynote you'll deliver to the NRPA
membership in October?
Well, I'm going to be diving into
a couple of different areas. We're
going to talk a little bit about how
chaos creates opportunity and how
changing times actually create new
consumer needs. In parks and rec,
there are some interesting trends that
have us thinking about reconnecting
with our families in times of uncertainty and the vacations and life
experiences that we want to have.
We'll also get into building a culture
of innovation within your team so
that people are trying new things,
suggesting ideas and experimenting. We'll talk about trend-spotting,
where I'll show you how to actually
find the new opportunities that are
out there. And then, finally, we'll
talk about infectious communication - how you communicate in a
way that makes your ideas stick. It'll
be fun and high-energy, with lots of
cool little case studies too.
What experience do you have working with the park and recreation field?
I've worked with almost every field
in some sense (300 clients in the last
four years). So a lot of that has included recreation and tourism - both at
the country level and with different
sport and leisure brands. I grew up
outside of the city in rural Alberta
and did ski racing on the weekends,

July 2013 - Parks & Recreation

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