Some of the largest and most successful Norwegian companies we know today are either infrastructure companies, production companies or focus exclusively on business-to-business activities. In today’s fast-paced and ever changing business environment, capturing the attention of individual consumers is becoming attractive, both for sales and for branding reasons. We teamed up with Europe’s largest producer of renewable energy, Statkraft, to explore how a traditional production company can leverage their unique position to approach the end-user market.

🤔 The challenge

The industrial development over the past 250 years has been made possible by fossil energy sources. In the next 10-20 years the energy market will undergo major changes, both in terms of how energy is priced, how energy is produced and consumed, and how the demand for sustainable solutions increases. Due to these, and many other reasons, the energy market is evolving. Individual consumers become increasingly important. How can a giant energy production company innovate to position themselves closer to end consumers?

💪 Our approach

Together with a dedicated and engaged innovation team from Statkraft, we set out with a broad and ambitious goal. Throughout an iterative, five week sprint, we worked to identify, test and validate concepts ranging from those close to the core business, to more disruptive innovations. After week 1, we had mapped a variety of possible entrances to the market, possible competitors and clearly defined our goal. When week 2 was over we had gathered an ocean of user insight, which helped us scrap some ideas and double down on others. Over the following two weeks we did rapid prototyping combined with running feedback from users. This was combined with a series of meetings with subject specialists in Statkraft to validate the internal viability of the different concepts.

«Working with Reodor was very useful. They helped us explore a wide range of opportunities in a very efficient and effective process. We learnt a lot from a short sprint period» – Lotte Løland Nordal, Senior Advisor Corporate Strategy Development, Statkraft

🙌 The results

By the end of the five week sprint, we had identified a clear gap in the market with a number of possible ways to fill that gap. What was initially a long list of possible but unsubstantiated concepts, had been narrowed down to a few compelling concepts - all of which had undergone real-life user tests. Each concept was consequently prioritized according to their perceived desirability, internal commercial and brand potential, as well as the technical and regulatory complexity of getting from here to there. This laid the groundwork for further innovation work.