Vision & Mission
ISET exists to close the most significant gap in higher education: an entire $2.5 trillion industry with no dedicated, intelligence-led programme anywhere in the world.
Think of ISET as the intelligence engine behind a global network of university programmes. We design the curriculum. We build the AI tools. We produce the scoring systems and live data. Partner universities localise, deliver, assess, and award. Together, we create something neither could build alone.
Every Event Tourism Professional Deserves World-Class Education
A world where every event tourism professional — regardless of geography, background, or institutional affiliation — has access to intelligence-led education that matches the sophistication and scale of the industry they serve.
Event tourism is the world’s largest unrecognised profession. Millions work in it. Trillions flow through it. Governments stake their economic futures on it. And yet the educational infrastructure to support it simply does not exist at postgraduate level. Our vision is to change that — permanently and globally.
Design. Collaborate. Produce.
Design
We architect curricula that are intelligence-first, production-oriented, and globally portable. Every programme is built on live data, real industry briefs, and AI-enhanced teaching resources.
Collaborate
We partner with universities who share our conviction that event tourism deserves dedicated education. They bring academic scholarship; we bring industry intelligence. The combination is greater than either part.
Produce
We generate the intelligence outputs — scoring systems, rankings, AI tools, research indices — that make our programmes unlike anything else in higher education. Students produce real consulting artefacts, not essays about theory.
Six Strategic Objectives
Everything ISET does is organised around six measurable objectives. Each programme, partnership, and technology investment maps back to at least one of these.
Curriculum Architecture
Design 9-tier programme frameworks (T0-T8) that partner universities can localise and deliver under their own academic governance.
Intelligence Infrastructure
Provide AI-powered tools, 7 proprietary scoring systems, and live data from 90,000+ events across 228 markets as embedded teaching resources.
Global University Network
Build a network of partner universities across every continent, enabling students to access event tourism education wherever they are.
Industry Integration
Embed real industry briefs, live data, and practitioner mentorship into every programme so graduates are consulting-ready from day one.
Research Leadership
Produce primary research through our scoring systems, rankings, and indices that advances the discipline and informs policy globally.
Equity of Access
Ensure no geography, institution size, or resource constraint prevents a university from offering world-class event tourism education.
Five Governing Principles
Intelligence Over Opinion
Every claim is grounded in data. Our scoring systems, rankings, and indices replace anecdote with evidence. We teach students to do the same.
Collaboration Over Competition
We do not compete with universities. We amplify them. Our model is additive: we bring what they lack; they bring what we cannot.
Production Over Consumption
Students do not passively consume content. They produce consulting reports, strategic audits, AI-generated insights, and portfolio artefacts from week one.
Immersion Over Instruction
Learning happens in the field, in live data, in real briefs. We replace lectures about the industry with work inside it.
Equity Over Exclusivity
World-class education should not be the privilege of a few institutions. Our model exists to democratise access to intelligence-led teaching.
The $2.5 Trillion Gap
Compare this to adjacent sectors: hospitality has the Cornell School of Hotel Administration (founded 1922), sport has dedicated MBA programmes at dozens of institutions, tourism management is offered at over 200 universities worldwide. Event tourism — a sector larger than many of these combined — has nothing equivalent. ISET was created to address this structural absence.
25 Years in the Making
ISET did not begin in a boardroom. It began in the field — across 25 years of producing, managing, and consulting on events across multiple continents. Its founder, Gaurav Garg, spent a quarter-century immersed in event tourism before asking the question that became ISET:
Why does the world’s largest experience economy have no dedicated educational infrastructure?
The answer was not that nobody cared. It was that nobody had both the industry depth and the technological capability to build the intelligence layer that such education requires. After building EventZR Intelligence — with 90,000+ events tracked, 228 markets scored, and 7 proprietary scoring systems — the foundation was finally in place.
ISET was announced in 2026, with first cohort enrolments through partner universities planned for January 2027.
In Memory of Catherine Pearson
1960 – 2007
Catherine Pearson was Head of School for Events at Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett University) and a pioneering figure in event management education in the United Kingdom. She was among the first academics to argue that events deserved dedicated programme status, not subordination within hospitality or leisure curricula.
As Gaurav Garg’s academic mentor during his postgraduate studies, Catherine shaped the intellectual conviction that events are a strategic discipline deserving rigorous, dedicated educational infrastructure. Her belief that the industry needed its own academic identity — not borrowed from adjacent fields — is the philosophical foundation upon which ISET is built.
ISET is dedicated to her memory. The institution she would have wanted to build now exists.