energy

Intelligences

When Customer Insights Meet Business Constraints: Building a Go-to-Market Strategy for a Smart Home Offering in a Regulated Space

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ELIZABETH A. KELLEY ILLUME Advising, LLC AMANDA E. DWELLEY ILLUME Advising, LLC Case Study—This case draws on work in the energy efficiency industry where many utilities rely on data-driven insights and decision-making to encourage consumers to adopt energy-saving products and behaviors. In this highly regulated industry, utility staff must show value through big data, and studies often rely exclusively on quantitative data analytics to create behavioral models to explain or predict behavior. However, purely data-driven research often fails to answer questions about why customers behave a certain way, and what product or program managers and marketers can do about it. In this case study, the team from ILLUME Advising LLC (ILLUME), a research consultancy in the clean energy industry, illustrates how their cross-functional team paired qualitative and quantitative research on residential home energy use. The case study draws on an exploratory market and segmentation study for an electric utility interested in engaging customers...

Intelligences

The Model of Change: A Way to Understand the How and Why of Change

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JOHANNE MOSE ENTWISTLE and MIA KRUSE RASMUSSEN Developing sustainable solutions within the energy sector requires a holistic, interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinary partnerships need common frameworks that enable dialogue and knowledge exchange between different perspectives. In this paper we present ‘The Model of Change’ as a framework for designing and evaluating different efforts in innovation projects. By insisting that effects of solutions have to be understood as a complex interplay of context, preconditions, perception, and interaction, The Model of Change becomes a tool to help us bring nuance to the simplistic cause-effect view that often dominates energy research. This type of contextual knowledge is essential to reproduce successes, improve failures and develop sustainable solutions that work....

Intelligences

Designing Anthropological Reflection within an Energy Company

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LOUISE LØGSTRUP, MAREN MELISSA NELSON-BURK, WAFA SAID MOSLEH and WENDY GUNN The move towards a more liberalized energy market and the emergent smart grid technology has forced a Scandinavian energy company to begin rethinking the relation between themselves and private energy end users. Originally a unidirectional relationship, the present and future have potential for a more bidirectional relationship between the company and their customers. During this process the company has realized that they lack knowledge about private energy end users. The company has run a demonstration project simulating the face of the electricity smart grid in private households and has used ethnographic methods to investigate the system effect of private households’ participation. Our paper questions why this kind of approach is reproducing the unidirectional relationship instead of creating a bidirectional relationship. We propose an extension of the ethnographic approach whereby anthropological reflection is generated in the company through a flexible...

Intelligences

People and Energy: A Design-led Approach to Understanding Everyday Energy Use Behaviour

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DAN LOCKTON, FLORA BOWDEN, CATHERINE GREENE, CLARE BRASS and RAMA GHEERAWO Reducing home energy use is a major societal challenge, involving behaviour change alongside infrastructure improvements. However, many approaches lump ‘energy demand’ together as something homogeneous, addressable primarily through quantitative feedback, rather than basing interventions on an understanding of why people use energy as they do. Our contention is that people don’t set out to ‘use energy’: its use is a side effect of solving everyday problems, meeting needs for comfort, light, cooking, cleaning, entertainment, and so on....