Talk
Shaping a new, digital, and participatory era of energy
Thursday, June 9
11:00 – 11:45
Lecture Room
Chris Moody
Chief Design Officer, Wolff Olins
Our Client is one of the biggest energy companies in the world. So Wolff Olins was thrilled to support the client's team on the journey in shaping a new, digital, and participatory era of energy and answer fundamental questions:
What do we sell, if people produce their own energy?
How can we connect 1bn people that are currently without safe and sustainable energy?
How can we compete with Silicon Valley brands for future energy services?
How can we unite our organisation across 30 extremely diverse countries?
Together with our client we developed a strategic platform for growth, combining the strength of a truly global organisation with the opportunities of a new, open and connected world. At the heart of this strategy we developed 5 ways in which our client will open up all critical parts of its business:
1. Open the infrastructure to more uses and maximise the value of assets. E.g. through a collaboration with Telcos to bring superfast internet even to remote rural areas.
2. Open up new value for the customers through services that meet their changing needs. E.g. by driving the digitisation of the home in advanced markets like Italy and Spain
3. Open the company's energy to more people by connecting more people to our client's services. E.g. through micro grid solutions in remote areas of Kenya and Chile
4. Open employees to more knowledge by sharing internally and externally. E.g. by training women in rural parts of Latin America and Africa to become solar engineers
5. Establish open and transparent ways to do business with all critical stakeholders. E.g. by working to become carbon-free by 2050
A key factor in the development of the new brand was the highly collaborative process. Throughout the project we challenged our client's ways of working by including all parts of the company's organisation and all key agencies in every step of the project. We travelled throughout Europe meeting customers, stakeholders, and employees to understand the local requirements. We also had constant loops of sharing work in progress and receiving feedback from the countries using a variety of digital collaboration tools, such as a digital project journal. We designed the creative process in a way that constantly exposed the team to new feedback, from involving all Wolff Olins offices, to countless co-creation sessions with the client, and cross-agency workshops to ensure the brand is built for all relevant touch points.
At the start of our creative process we explored how the abstract concepts of power and openness can be visualized – From kinetic energy to physical phenomena to data driven systems we’ve asked ourselves: what does power and openness look and feel like? How can we translate these concepts into an expression that truly embodies the future of the organization?