This definition suggests that innovation is broader than technological advances in terms of engineering or technology but encompasses also changes in management and business practices such as mergers, acquisitions, partnerships etc. In this sense, it can be said that all businesses require some level of innovative activity in order to remain competitive.

When it comes to energy and natural resource companies, innovation is a necessity.

Innovation is important to because it allows them to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. To stay relevant, these companies need to innovate and find new ways of doing things that will provide value for customers. If they fail to innovate, they will be left behind.

The world is changing at a fast pace and the increasing use of technology allows companies to do more with less. This means that if energy and natural resources companies do not keep pace with these changes, then they will lose out on business opportunities. Innovation is also important because it provides more opportunities for growth. Innovation is about building new things and doing new things.

The benefits of innovation are not just limited to increasing a company’s market share and improving its bottom line. It also provides significant social benefits as it helps create jobs, improve productivity and provide better products for customers. When it comes to energy and natural resource companies, innovation is a necessity. These organisations are tasked with finding new resources, extracting them, processing them for use in the market, and then delivering these resources to the market.

It is not easy to innovate effectively, but it is very important.

Any company that wants to grow and stay relevant must be able to create value for customers through innovation. In order to do all of this, companies need new ideas. They need people who can come up with the next big thing that will make it easier for these organizations to get their products to market. An organisation’s ability to innovate is the key to its success. Innovation is what will allow energy and natural resource companies to thrive in a volatile world.

The energy and natural resource sectors are becoming more important to society. There are many reasons as to why this is so:

• The demand for energy from consumers has increased due to an increase in population.
• The demand for energy has increased because technology has developed to a point where the consumption of energy is needed for the production process. For example, some factories require high amounts of electricity in order to function properly.
• The demand for energy will increase due to the rise in technology. For example, new types of products and services, require more energy.
• The demand for energy will increase due to the rise in income and wealth. For example, as a person gets wealthier, they are more likely to purchase goods/services that require large amounts of energy.

Energy and natural resources organisations face unique challenges driving innovation:

The first challenge is the morality of our technology and how we use it. It’s clear that humanity has made some awesome advances in science and engineering over the last century or so, but as these developments are increasingly impacting society on a global scale, now more than ever before in history, they should be considered ethically by humans as well as machines.

Automation is changing businesses from top to bottom (and will continue to do so for decades) and if left unregulated could lead to an abundance of jobs disappearing. However, the true benefit of automation is not so much in the jobs that disappear; it’s how we use our time and energy when there aren’t as many routine tasks to do. We can now focus more on innovation and creativity because machines are doing a lot of the heavy lifting for us.

The second challenge is how we should best use energy and resources to fuel our technology. I think this is the biggest societal problem that humans face today, more so than automation, because it’s a problem of scarcity rather than an abundance of jobs. How to make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy resource in a timely fashion, not only because they want to but also because society has demanded it. The issue then becomes one of cost, both in terms of capital costs and environmental impact.

The third challenge is the most important one: how we should best use our time and energy with technology so that we can improve human civilization, now and in the coming decades.

Co-innovation is the key to solving challenges in energy and natural resources. Co-innovation, by definition, is the collaboration of two or more parties to work towards a common goal. By working together in this way, a greater understanding can be achieved as well as fresh perspectives on problems that arise during such collaborations.

Society is like a large orchestra, with each person playing their own instrument. Each person has to play in time and tune to the others around them. Some people are strong in some areas while weak in others, so they are capable of only small contributions on their own.

But when a team of people comes together to work on one project, each person can contribute their own strengths while the whole team works toward a common goal. The final product is many times more powerful than what any individual could have created alone.

That is why many successful companies are formed from the union of a business person and a technical person. Business people dream up great ideas, but they cannot implement them without help. Technical people can understand the details of an idea, but they do not know how to make it into something that will appeal to customers.

The union of a technical person and a business person is a powerful one because it combines the expertise necessary to both conceive and implement an idea. When this happens, the result is always successful. In this way, the success of a person or company is not due to one factor alone. It takes many different people working together toward a common goal in order for something great to be created.

Powerful ideas and new technologies require the work of many people to bring them into existence. 聽 at the new Centre Of Excellence for Asset Intensive Industries.

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In the beginning, there are needs to be filled, pain points to be identified, and processes to be improved. With the benefit of years of industry experience, close partnerships with leading organisations, and an eye on the latest technology, SAP鈥檚 Asset Intensive Industries Centre of Excellence keeps track of a backlog of topics. Through consultation with customers, partners and alignment with , this backlog is prioritised into a vision.

Vision is important; and formulating that vision along with high-level conceptual architecture, value to industry, and to 51风流forms part of a business case that we socialise with stakeholders for consideration. Once a topic is approved, the rubber hits the road and the work can begin in earnest.

I鈥檇 like to share a real-world example. One topic the COE is passionate about is the efficient maintenance of assets. Over many years 51风流has become a leader in this space with a feature-rich . Managing all aspects of an asset lifecycle including history, planning, spare parts, availability, the people involved, and their health and safety.

Increasingly the management of assets is outsourced to 3rd party service providers. Leveraging these partner organisations brings many benefits but also introduces new challenges and risks including double-handling of information, lack of visibility, data timeliness, and the management of asset knowledge.

Back when I started my career, we used to handle orders by fax; and these days we use the to manage procurement. And this network approach is the vision for a collaborative work order, where Asset Owners (for example mining companies, public sector organisations, and utilities) share their information with 3rd parties to enable modern collaboration that no longer relies on emails and phone calls.

To realise the network vision, we decided to leverage the and as the core foundation of the solution architecture. From here we have been able to design high-level process flows, data model, and screen concepts.

Inviting industry collaborators meant explaining the vision and agreeing to work together on the solution. The response has been fantastic with hundreds of hours of support from industry to articulate the as-is processes and associated pain points. And to provide input and review the to-be process and concepts.

During the pandemic, this has meant remote workshops leveraging tools such as Mural to collaborate. Along with the world鈥檚 leading mining and utility companies our co-innovation includes organisations such as Deutsche Bahn one of the world鈥檚 leading mobility and logistics companies.

With industry and 51风流working together we have been able to develop and publish a to realise the vision of a collaborative work order. has been a breath of fresh air to help me through the pandemic. I knew I鈥檇 find some interesting challenges along the way. What I鈥檓 delighted to find is a passion from both our customers and our product engineering teams to make the world run better. about the new Centre Of Excellence for Asset Intensive Industries.

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In its simplest form, XM is the process of monitoring every interaction people experience with a company in order to spot opportunities for improvement. By understanding what people are feeling and why, companies can focus their efforts and resources on the changes that will have the biggest impact on their customers or employees.

The first step to effective XM is understanding how people feel when they interact with your business. This information is called Experience, or X-data. When this is combined with traditional, operational or 鈥極-data鈥�, such as sales numbers, processing times or staff turnover, it enables companies to understand what is happening and what they need to do to fix or improve operations.

Experience Management is already big business: the market is now estimated at more than USD$44bn annually. In Australia, XM has been adopted by the likes of Volkswagen, Chobani, Allianz, Finder, Fuji Xerox, and Sigma Healthcare. In fact,聽聽2019 Customer Experience Management Survey revealed that 90% of the world鈥檚 biggest companies now have a chief experience officer (CXO) or chief customer officer (CCO), up from 65% in 2017.

Insight into action

It鈥檚 not hard to understand why XM is growing so fast. It鈥檚 a real driver of business results. Since implementing an XM program,聽聽has seen its Net Promoter Score increase by +49 points, while average order sizes have increased by 8%. But beyond the bottom line, Experience Management is also a clear driver of innovation.

At SAP, we believe in the聽. This is an approach that is founded on empathy for the stakeholders involved. Working through the phases of an innovation roadmap (Explore, Discover, Design, Deliver, Run & Scale) you quickly realise how intertwined Experience and Innovation are.

In fact, in many ways successful XM and innovation programs are very similar. Often a fundamental driver of innovation is the need to improve experience.聽 One common example of poor XM I regularly witness is employees double handling information 鈥� due to siloed teams and inefficient processes 鈥� which leads to errors, frustration, and wasted effort. Often, this can be solved with innovative approaches and technology, like process automation, edge computing, or new mobile applications.

Getting to the root of a problem

In this example, by using XM to understand the biggest frustrations your employees are facing 鈥� and what they want to fix the issues 鈥� businesses can get a crystal-clear understanding of the problem, which is the first step on any innovation journey. Key to this approach is gaining empathy for the users by understanding their experience.

What鈥檚 more, by engaging and empowering the employees on the front-line, who typically have the best understanding of current systems and how they could be improved, XM also enables organisations to capture feedback and ideas which might not otherwise see the light of day.

Take for example a business complaining of a lack of repeat sales. Through XM, the business can identify that the problem is not the product, the sales process, or even the pricing. Instead, it might reveal the biggest problem is the after sales and service process.

A better understanding of the problem (and the users) helps inform potential solutions. In this instance, rather than dropping the sales price or introducing self-service scenarios, Experience Management enables the business to understand that technology like chat bots, connected products, or digital twins may result in a better outcome. Grounding innovation in deep insights means better problem solving and results.

Empathy and innovation

Using techniques from Experience Management allows businesses to truly empathise with customers. The reality is that too many businesses believe that they understand the problems faced by their customers or employees already. But if organisations do not ask users about the issues they鈥檙e facing, and why they鈥檙e problematic, it鈥檚 impossible for them to get the real picture.

When it comes to solving problems, generating ideas from many different points of view greatly increases your chances of successful innovation. Experience Management is a powerful way of gathering a diversity of opinions and involving stakeholders in the innovation journey. Of course, finding a problem and generating potential solutions is not the end of innovation. But as companies like聽聽prove, user-testing new products at scale with Experience Management means you can get real time feedback on new products and a cycle of continuous innovation improvement.

These days, more than ever, staying one step ahead of the competition is the key to success. Businesses need to ask themselves: are your employees, customers, and partners having their expectations met? Understanding their expectations will be the first step in an effective innovation journey and will ensure you are competing well into the future.

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