Challenge

The energy sector is one of the many currently being put under pressure by the wave of digital disruption. A heritage energy company in Italy came to us at Futureberry for help: what can we do internally to navigate this massive change?

Vision

A 6 month plan was put into action that had the goal of developing a culture of innovation from within their organization. One facet of this plan was to identify and develop a small body of employees from within the organization called "Digital Champions", who would become catalysts to implementing digital change.

Process

The section of the Digital Champion project that I was involved in was the 3rd phase: "Development of Digital Competencies". Proceeding phases included a rigorous selection phase and a workshop on the development of innovation attitude, in which each team developed an idea to implement within the parent company.

We defined 3 core competencies: Digital Awareness, Design Approach & Hacker Attitude. See following 3 brief descriptions:

Digital Awareness

Vision and understanding of technological and behavioural trends. Capacity to leverage current digital tools to develop content and generate traffic.

Design Approach

Capacity to realize products and services that respond directly to the needs of the final user through a people-centered approach.

Hacker Attitude

Ability to solve problems and build solutions through the creative use of the (scarce) resources available.

Taking into consideration the intangible and soft nature of these competencies, we were faced with significant difficulty in our approach to transfering these skills into the participants.

Result

A bank-rolled 2-day digital prototyping workshop. In the previous workshop, the participants had worked on some simple ideas that they considered fundamental innovations, to be implemented ASAP. After studying the ideas of the 4 groups, we noticed the potential lessons that could be learned in rapidly building digital prototypes. As such, we decided to focus the workshop on prototyping the respective ideas.

We started the workshop with some theory in which we presented some fundamental case studies such as Zappos, Dropbox and Groupon, as well as a comprehensive process for them to follow throughout development. We conducted an energizer called "Tin Foil Hats", a small prototyping excercise that we learnt about from our friends at IDEO U. For the development phase - which occupied close to 60% of the workshop - we provided the participants with 120 euros, a Digital ToolKit, a Digital Prototyping process and our undying help and attention. Finally we concluded with a debrief (in a group and then indivudal) section in which we elaborated upon the 3 digital competencies, and we assisted the particpants in redefining each competency, sculpted by their experiences throughout the workshop.

Each group ended the workshop with a working digital prototype. We focused on producing validated learning through the prototype by building functionality that could directly confirm or deny assumptions that they had previously identified.

My Role

I worked on the development of all the content, including the physical material (Toolkit, process, presentation). During the workshop I worked very closely with each individual group; my role was to inspire them, keep them on track, suggest tools for them to use and assist with technical problems.

Achievements

It was great to see how the participants grew over the 2 day period. From being completely unaware of what a wordpress blog was, to generating 40k visualisations on a FB post overnight. They made huge leaps and bounds following a process which I had developed.