Pablo, Tobias: in today’s media environment, we hear so much about ‘innovation’ that it can sound like a buzzword. Could we begin by defining exactly what innovation means at SPIE?
Pablo: "Yes, the term can feel overused. At SPIE, innovating means implementing new solutions which add value – for us as a company or for our clients. That might be in the form of a new process, new service, new product, or new tool."
Tobias: "Yes: as important as they are, we don’t reduce innovation to technical developments. Innovation can also be a different business model, a fresh approach. And innovation at SPIE means exactly that: at SPIE. Even if it’s well established elsewhere, anything new for SPIE – even just for a single SPIE entity – is an innovation. And in that sense, the definition is very specific."
On these terms, how innovative is SPIE at present?
Pablo : "SPIE is on a journey. If we go back ten years, we were focusing on existing products and processes. Since then, the world around has changed, and we’ve been changing with it. A positive development here is the increased societal interest in energy efficiency and the energy transition, which has rendered our role more visible. This, in turn, has made us more ambitious about what we can achieve, and encouraged us to try to new things. As a result, we have definitely become more innovative…
But the world is changing even faster now: climate, geopolitics, artificial intelligence. And with visibility comes scrutiny: our clients, our suppliers, and financial analysts are watching to see what we do. In response to new challenges, we need to keep offering new solutions. And that means: innovation."
Where are our existing strengths in innovation? And in which areas do we need to improve?
Tobias : "I see two key strengths. Firstly, we are close to our customers, meaning that we see where they need innovations. Secondly, we have a strong collective expertise with people who are keen to innovate.
Where we need to focus is on identifying and leveraging emerging solutions. For grid congestion in regions like the Netherlands, we have developed an integrated approach that combines our energy advisory services with the practical implementation of a complete energy solution, optimized by AI-driven predictive analyses and energy management. The solution has been successfully implemented at our first clients and is ready to be scaled up as part of a smart grid. We will also be able to apply AI to streamline our own processes in areas such as contract management or for our custom AI Chatbot that answers our French colleagues' HR demands with targeted and specific answers.
So innovation at SPIE has both a customer-focused and an internal side – and often, the two go hand in hand."
Pablo: "I agree. We are a decentralised company operating close to our clients, and this generates innovation. Yet it also poses a challenge: because we are decentralised, we sometimes have trouble transferring our innovations from where they often happen, on the ground in a SPIE entity, to the rest of the Group. We have to get better at transversality and industrialise our ability to deploy innovation that works from one business unit to another, from one country to another.
And we need to continue embracing change, be open to innovation as we move forward. This means encouraging our managers to be curious and explore new horizons."
Innovations don’t always succeed. How do we deal with that?
Pablo: "Innovation always entails uncertainty. So innovation at SPIE is about managing that uncertainty – which makes it a management issue. If we’re asking people to innovate, then we have to allow them to try out new things – with the attendant risk of failure. Making mistakes, learning from them, and then trying again: that is how innovation happens. In view of that, we do need to be willing to move away from a mindset where every last detail has to be perfect prior to deployment."
Tobias: "It can be helpful to identify two distinct factors in innovation: problem-solving and curiosity. On the one hand, there’s problem-solving: a specific issue needs to be addressed – and that can require a fresh approach. On the other hand, there is curiosity, openness to new technologies: sometimes, a new development might provide a solution to a problem of which we weren’t even aware."
Pablo: "Precisely! We have to become even more open to new things from outside. ‘Not made here’ should never be a reason to say no."
Does that mean that innovation happens with our clients and suppliers?
Tobias: "Innovation starts with our people and our ability to support them in addressing the issue, and yes, our partners are hugely important in this. We are not, primarily, a technology development company, but we have close relations with many suppliers and start-ups focused on pioneering new products. Our strength lies in embedding innovative components as part of new solutions. That’s why we are building up our ecosystem – like at ARENA2036, for instance, in Stuttgart, where we form part of a community of companies working on sustainable technology."
Pablo: "This is exactly the kind of approach we need to keep developing. At SPIE, we consider colleagues, clients, innovation partners, and ecosystems as fundamental prerequisites on which to capitalise. And what does it mean? It entails activating our teams and embedding innovation into the agenda of the different layers of the organisation."