Turning Ideas into Value
Tom Flaherty is a partner with Strategy& – a part of the PwC network – who has focused on utility growth strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and business transformation for over forty years. He has been involved with approximately eighty percent of utility M&A stock transactions greater than a billion dollars in the U.S., and supported clients in Great Britain, Italy, Spain, France, Argentina, Venezuela, Australia, and Canada in consolidation or carve-out assignments. He has also provided expert testimony in more than thirty jurisdictions on utility combinations and benefits.
Utilities are turning their attention to embracing innovation as a means to modernize the network and revitalize the customer relationship. It’s only a matter of time before new product markets emerge, expanded revenue streams open up, and meaningful contribution to margins result. Right?
Far from it. Creating the innovation platforms and leveraging them for enhanced network and customer outcomes is absolutely hard work. But turning ideas, technologies, products and services into go-to-market offerings is comparatively simple relative to what comes next.
Achieving market success lies not just in what companies can take to market. But in how they convert ideation into tangible, consequential and sustainable commercial outcomes that ring the register.
Innovation for utilities centers on four key pillars: performance, technologies, products, business models. Only one pillar directly relates to internal execution and that’s performance. Of the remaining three, product innovation most directly links to commercialization. But all three together create the value platform.
However, product, technology and business model innovation in the industrial and consumer products sectors provide a glimpse of what’s to come for utilities.