Aligning Visibility with Performance
Tom Flaherty is a Senior Advisor to Strategy&, which is part of the PwC network. He specializes in corporate strategy, particularly growth and innovation.
Utilities have spent the last several years conceiving a purpose for innovation and refining how to engage their organizations and employees in sustained execution. The question of where innovation was placed organizationally was not immediately important.
Managements sidestepped an institutional debate over whether innovation was an organic activity with spontaneous characteristics, or an activity requiring direct and constant nurturing. Instead, managements chose to gain traction first, while deferring long-term structural decisions.
As these formative efforts have progressed, dialogue is restarting about how to best position innovation. Managements are reconsidering whether leadership should be more organizationally formalized, or whether this would hinder the agility and speed originally sought. The challenge now is balancing open engagement with the need to produce tangible, meaningful outcomes.
Placement History
Innovation stand-up efforts within utilities often started with little organizational formality other than executive sponsorship. Unless there was an immediate market need or a splashy enterprise commitment to innovation, stand-up efforts were gradual and informal.