Product-Service Innovation – Innovation in the Uncertainty


Innovation in an uncertainty – the future of energy and smart living

The uncertainty project is a collaboration work with a big French energy company. The client brief is to create a better customer relationship with the company since the energy market was disrupted by the digital revolution and smart technology. The outcome is innovation and strategies for both short- and long-term. Our group's proposed ideas were selected to be further presented with other colleagues in the company. The short-term strategy proposed was referred as the easy and simple solution.

The short-term idea was a 'Battery home' concept. It was a new product-service system design that offers a better energy visualisation for consumers to monitor and control their energy usage. Utilising the 'battery' symbol in smartphone into a battery for home was the key concept. On the other hand, we proposed the company to partner with a big Swedish furniture company to develop a new lifestyle for the future of smart living. The core idea is to focus on the new lifestyle product that can harnessing the energy from the natural sources.

This two months project offered me a chance to experiment with different methodologies in each stage e.g. scenarios thinking, discourse analysis, ten types of innovation (by Doblin). I had contributed the big role in initiating, designing and developing for both strategies. However, without a teamwork in researching and brainstorming, we could not make it to the success. I think our group was very good at collaborating and managing the work within the plan. Though we were asked to fail in the process to learn something, we did not quite face a big failure since we were working along together well. However, I think the key failure is that we can be more experimented and take a risk with some ideas since I later find out that sometimes a valuable idea that might seem unbelievable and unable to perfectly construct a physical solution in the present, it is this extreme vision that is the opportunity to develop a desired future.

March 2016