When you are ready and looking for innovation opportunities, how will you seize them? Assuming such innovations and solutions for your energy business will show up on your radar, will you recognise it for what it is? How do you make sure you see the value and its potential? Especially true when innovations challenge the conventional way of thinking, and a new framework is required.
What worked before…
Your methods have worked before. It has gotten your energy company to where it is today in the present. But are you sure this will also get you to tomorrow, to the future even? How do you separate these incoming developments, these innovations, into excellent opportunities and frivolous play-things? How to make sure you seize the right opportunities?
New Frameworks
New technologies enable new ways of working. New ways of working that can clash with how we are used to working. The most notorious example is with the application of blockchain, where a systemic advantage comes from working together with your competitors. Working together with your competition has not been common practice over the past decades.
New Worlds, New Needs
Carefully look at these technologies. As a thought experiment, see what it enables when you try to apply it within a context. And what other use cases are out there. It is like brainstorming, embrace all the options that come up, how unrealistically they appear at first.
Learning by Doing
While all those ideas and thoughts of how the world might work are fine and dandy, how will you validate those ideas? Can you run an experiment with it? A mock-up environment? Do you have to build a small scale MVP to test it, involve actual users and see what they feel about these developments?
DIY or not?
How will you do all this, on top of your other responsibilities? Assuming you still want to seize the relevant opportunities, how will you learn and master it at a sufficient level that makes sense? Do you get help to master this, or help to do it for you?
Two Seizing Tracks
There are two tracks here, either you learn to do it yourself, with or without help to master it. Or the other option is to get help to identify these opportunities for you.
The Learn to Seize Track
This track is for you if you like to stay involved in every aspect of the business, preferably have time to spare to take on this extra responsibility. You could opt to learn this on your own, or with some expert help and coaching on the job. You will need to master thinking in these new frameworks, imagining new worlds and think of ways to validate your identified opportunities.
The Outsourced Seizing Track
The alternative is to outsource this responsibility. This track does not imply that you have no involvement at all. It also does not mean that from time to time, some ‘magic’ comes out of a crystal ball, affecting your business and leaving you wondering what this is all about. When you outsource this part correctly, you have hired a guide to help you navigate you through these opportunities as they arise. A guide that can prepare you for the things coming and how to capitalise on specific opportunities. Or even what hyped developments can safely be ignored.
Which track is for you?
