Policy to this line of thought, a washing machine may have an appeal of 10 and a refrigerator an appeal of 0. What does following this logic mean for you, as an energy distributor? “We will not have an Internet of things, but rather an Internet of everything, that is, the net will be in everything, even the medicines we take. We will take smart medicines, connected to a monitoring system that will intervene releasing their active ingredient at the necessary time. Today we are creating the Internet of things in our power stations and plants. Our colleagues must also be connected and if, for example, they have an accident, the system must realise, thus setting off an alarm, reporting the position and getting emergency assistance there as soon as possible.”
sustainable mobility tests on ‘internal’ customers, or rather, our employees, first of all. We launched new smart home solutions that offer a home energy monitoring service integrated with a security alarm. We tested it on 500 colleagues who gave us feedback on the benefits and the critical issues.” Can you tell me anything else about innovative processes? “Yes, in ENEL we apply the ‘innovation formula’ which I created and patented along with my colleague Ivan Ortenzi.”
When you do something new, you always make a mistake somewhere along the line. We want to increase the number of mistakes in order to raise success and, at the same time, eliminate repeated mistakes.
How does it work? “The ‘innovation formula’ states that innovation is the same as the multiplication of the values of three aspects: creativity (that is, having a good idea and giving it a value from 1 to 10), the execution (that is, how to implement one’s idea and give it a value from 1 to 10) and the appeal (that is, the value given by a customer to the idea with that implementation giving a value from 1 to 10). It is almost a game which makes us think about how to generate ideas, in order to guarantee the implementation and measure customer appeal. Let me give you an example. In 2004, I collaborated with Nokia to devise a touchscreen mobile phone with GPS. It was the Nokia 7710. The idea had a value of 10, as did its implementation and the appeal of the GPS, while the appeal of the touchscreen back then had a value of 0, because no-one wanted it at the time. Thus, by applying the ‘innovation formula’: 10 times 10 times 0 equals 0.” Did this innovation come too early? “Precisely. At the time, everyone wanted a small flip mobile phone, nothing like today’s keyboard-less mobiles. The Nokia 7710 was extremely similar to the current iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, and that was fourteen years ago. A smart idea, with a smart implementation but it did not have sufficient appeal at the time. That is why it is essential to observe customers. As regards internal technologies, our customers are the colleagues which manage them, while externally we refer to end clients.” Today we talk a lot about the “Internet of things.” It is an enormous universe. According
How do you see the next five/ten years in terms of innovation? “Increasingly more fun and more interconnected, in particular in terms of sectors. We are active in broadband, smart homes and home security, as well as in car sales and grid balancing. We are doing things that just two years ago, when I came to work at ENEL, we were not yet doing. There are six or seven new businesses. We sell insurance along with home energy supply and we will sell car insurance. Then there are mobility data. For example, it will be possible to optimise consumption courses and timescales, choosing those which avoid the traffic lights. I think that there will be increasingly more space to do positive things and increasingly greater competition between different sectors.” In a context which is increasingly more connected, what type of competition will there be? “It will be competition which may become cooperation. We are collaborating with Google for new energy generation technologies. Google has the data of all its clients who are looking for a new home and, thus, a new energy supplier and it can provide information on the home, comparing suppliers, proposing the purchase of solar panels with storage, offering an optimisation algorithm for the user’s specific consumption habits in order to set the energy system correctly and not depend on the energy suppliers. Google may become our competitor, as could Amazon that could manage the energy produced by the user by selling it to another, leaving ENEL out. However, we could collaborate and not compete with these parties. Business models are becoming increasingly more uneven and interconnected.”
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