Generating Energy together with Essent

How can you ensure your business stays relevant and valuable to your customer and creates sustainable value for the organisation? This is a constant challenge for any organisation. But, seeing things from a different perspective can be a powerful driver for positive change. UMIO’s Service Science Factory (SSF) is perfectly placed to bridge the gap between real-world business challenges and generating fresh new ideas that carry impact. Hackathons are a way of achieving results in record time.

This was energy supplier Essent’s first collaboration with UMIO’s Service Science Factory and it sparked an intensive and successful partnership. Working with companies in innovative ways and connecting student perspectives into projects gives an edge to the co-creation approach. A hackathon provides a means to accelerate innovation. Sabine Janssen, Head of UMIO’s Service Science Factory describes it as “a design sprint in which solutions are found for business challenges through co-creation.” For Essent, it involved letting two hundred fourth-year Digital Marketing & Innovation Management students loose on their real-world business challenge. And the result? According to Jan Kok, Director of Marketing & Digital Sustainable Energy Solutions at Essent, the ideas were eye-opening. You don’t just get a fresh look at your organisation, but more than forty innovative, exciting business ideas. “It holds up a mirror to you, provides fresh insights and energy. This is even stronger in the case of young people; they look at the world in a different way.”

The event brought 40 teams of 5 students together to work intensively on solving Essent’s business challenge within a limited timeframe. The question the groups were addressing was: ‘What can Essent do to increase customer loyalty and create sustainable customer and business value in the short, medium and long term?’

The student insights gave Jan and his colleagues immediate feedback on the way they present their brand. “They really took us into their world of experience. These students grew up with smartphones and it was striking that almost every idea revolved around an app, digital interaction and sustainability. They also grew up with the problems of climate change and for them sustainability is not just something companies do on the side, but it is a prerequisite for establishing a good customer relationship. During the presentations, when we showed the students all the things we do at Essent in the field of sustainability, many students indicated that we should communicate this more. We do much more on sustainability than we show.”