Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/425954
t m c » p u l s e | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 31 Q | What different jobs or responsibilities have you had during your 25 years with Shell? A | Half my career has been in research roles and always at the edge of what Shell was doing. It was often very innovative and exciting. The other half of my career was in business development and strategy type of roles but, again, always on the leading edge. I had roles in Shell Hydrogen, where I worked on a hydrogen economy plan in close cooperation with car manufac- turers. I worked in the bio-space of Shell for a while, and I even was the CTO for a start-up company for Shell, where we made a new building product that could really store lots of CO2. Q | So can you tell us where the idea for GameChanger was born and how it evolved? A | Shell GameChanger is pretty unique. Shell has long practiced open innovation, inviting ideas from outside the company and working with others. It started in 1996 when Shell management realized that if you wanted to do something really revolutionary, if you have a revolutionary, maybe disruptive idea, you have to protect it from the immune system of an organization. You have to keep it separate and give it a chance to prove its concept. The GameChanger program identifies and nurtures unproven ideas and works to prove the technical and commercial via- bility of that idea quickly and affordably. A budget was set apart from the research budget to allow GameChanger to be nimble in decision making and quick in funding. It combines the benefits of support from Shell with freedom for the team to make its own decisions. This is important when you are asking people to come up with revolutionary ideas that may seem too risky for our normal businesses to invest in. Today, we have worked with over 1,500 innovators and brought over 100 ideas into reality, with sometimes very big impacts. Many GameChanger projects fail and that's actually okay. It means we are working on difficult and high-risk opportunities. We often work with innovators whose revolution- ary ideas are high-risk, high-rewards type of oppor- tunities. When an innovator or proponent brings forth an idea, we work with them to determine proof of concept. It's here that ideas are stress-tested and proved to have merit or not. Many of them will fail. We are often asked, 'How do you measure success?' In GameChanger, it's about quickly determining proof of concept, moving forward ideas and opportunities that would not have existed otherwise. It's okay to fail as long as you do so fast and affordably. We're actually looking for those very difficult ideas where the normal business can't take that risk or where the idea is outside the current business strategy. We are creating the conditions in which innovation is supported within the industry. Q | Can you talk a little bit about the importance of disruptive ideas and thinking outside the box? A | Solving today's energy challenges requires all of us to make a collective effort; energy companies can't do it alone. These challenges need diverse and mul- tifaceted solutions involving many different kinds of thought and expertise. So we need to think differently and more creatively in how to solve today's problems. Shell GameChanger is there to invest in revolu- tionary and disruptive ideas. Not all of our projects are highly disruptive, we work with a portfolio of ideas and yes, some of them can be really disruptive to our cur- rent business. In GameChanger, we use four criteria to look at new ideas. The potential value—could the idea create substantial new value if it works? We look at novelty—is the idea fundamentally different— revolutionary and not evolutionary? Does someone have a doable plan to prove the concept quickly and affordably? It needs to be more than just a thought or concept; we are investing in people with great ideas and the capability to bring those ideas forward. The last is relevance—why Shell? Shell is not in the chocolate business, but in the energy business. Ideas must be energy-related, but they can be very disrup- tive to Shell's current business. That's okay. We might even work on ideas which might make the current way of producing energy laugh-worthy after a cou- ple of decades. Disruptive is okay. This is not easy because disruptive ideas, by definition, also trigger the immune system. So how can you navigate rapidly towards proof of concept, and show that an idea might actually work? We are working closely with our propo- nents both inside and outside our industry to speed up their development and deployment. We are looking for the moment that experts say, 'Oh, I never thought that could work but it actually seems to work, tell me more.' Q | Why is Shell investing in innovation in this way? A | Revolutionary innovation is changing the way we live, work and learn. Technology is becoming more complex and we need the right combination of traditional R&D and open innovation to help drive, develop and deploy new solutions. Most of the change that we do is evolutionary and it's very important to have incremental improvements. Think about the digital camera that suddenly became a breakthrough after being invented quite a while ago. Initially it looked awful, like a large box that took 30 seconds to take a picture —and who wants to have something like that? Really big breakthroughs are often revolutionary, changing how we share information and communicate. We have seen great value in our open innovation pro- grams and the opportunities for revolutionary ideas. Shell GameChanger is there to give those ideas a chance in the energy space. Currently, we are seeing that many of the best and brightest ideas are generated from unlikely partner- ships across different industry sectors and that's a space that GameChanger likes to play in. But you really have to look deeply at how innovative you are and how to become more innovative. Innovation is quite often connecting the dots. I think that innovation starts with combing through different ideas. I believe strongly that combing through unusual ideas and unusual approaches will lead to better innovation. Building on that, we can see how possible solutions for the challenges in the energy industry may not come from the energy experts. The best truly revo- lutionary ideas might come from experts of entirely different disciplines or industries. This will also work for the health or medical industry. I think there will be fantastic solutions for medical problems that come from non-medical experts. Experts from another field will ask the 'stupid' questions, come up with unusual approaches and think out of the box, not hindered by paradigms. I am convinced that Shell specialists may have solutions for certain medical challenges right now. The problem is how we connect those challenges and solutions. Revolutionary innovation is changing the way we live, work and learn. Technology is becoming more complex and we need the right combination of traditional R&d and open innovation to help drive, develop and deploy new solutions.