Energy & Resources

Transformational Growth: From oil company to sustainability champion

During the last decades, the oil company has gone through several transformations – from a regional oil refiner to becoming a global leader in renewable and circular solutions. Going forward, the company aims to leverage its ambitious sustainability vision, tap into new feedstock sources and open up new avenues of growth. Together with Z_punkt, a foresight process was developed to provide orientation for the company’s transformational growth endeavor.

In this process, we zoom in from a broad future framework scenario to derive a picture of the future opportunity landscape for the company. Using a cycle of interrelated process monitoring elements – quantitative and qualitative, bottom-up and top-down, we continuously explore changing market and innovation requirements over time; tracking the attractiveness of different opportunities and scanning for potential additions to the company’s opportunity portfolio. 

This continuous update and extension of the opportunity portfolio enables us to regularly provide new inspiration and insights for the company’s incubation pipeline. Additionally, the framework itself is designed to dynamically evolve in line with the company’s changing organizational requirements. The company can adjust the nature and amount of opportunity areas in the portfolio to meet new strategic guidelines and capabilities. In the end, not only must the foresight process drive the transformation, it must also be able to adapt as the transformation progresses.
 

Energy & Resources

Filling the innovation pipeline of a marine technology company with visionary business ideas

The client, a leading international company in the field of marine technology, wants to develop new, visionary business ideas and at the same time establish a new form of innovation culture. This was planned as a highly participatory process in which the "young potentials" and higher management levels were supposed to have an active part from the very beginning. The project started with a series of management interviews, in which also members of the executive board took part. The aim of the interviews was to find out what the management team thinks about the future and what they deem as the core competences of the company. But instead of creating a simple "competence map", specific "superheroes" were designed for each of the nine core competencies that were identified, in order to make them more tangible. Parallel to this, trend analyses were conducted in different industry fields and value creation areas, in order to identify future innovation potentials. In a two-day "Future Lab" in the offices of Z_punkt, all work streams came together. Jointly with the young potentials and managers, ideas for promising new business opportunities and growth fields for the company were generated in an inspiring setting based on the content that had been produced so far. After this, Z_punkt developed bold and easy-to-digest future profiles for the ideas in the form of “Future Worlds”. The ideas were then fed into an online challenge, in which the employees of the company had the opportunity to evaluate the ideas, develop them further or get inspired for coming up with their own new ideas. The ideas that received the highest ratings from the employee community were then presented and discussed in a two-day “Future Event”. Actors dressed as the (competence) superheroes were specially hired for this event, giving the discussions a particularly inspiring touch. The best ideas were then fed into the company's innovation pipeline.

Energy & Resources

Long term potential for innovation for a utility company

The client approached Z_punkt with a request for a comprehensive overview of the long term potential for new business for utility companies. Z_punkt is identifying key trends for the future energy market and deducing attractive potential for innovation for the client. The project is also producing images of the future, which illustrate new areas of activity for utility companies in the medium to long term. The project has produced a wide portfolio overview of future business opportunities, which will be used as the basis for systematic and inspired innovation management.