[Applause]
I’m sat at a huge wooden meeting table
the Sun is glaring through the window
the smell of strong coffee fills the
room and the man sat opposite me is
wearing a very smart suit he’s already
met with three of our competitors at
this very table each one has at least 20
years more experience than us and employ
10 times as many people he takes another
sip of his coffee leans forwards and
says so how many people do you employ I
take a deep breath and think we are in
deep and we are seriously seriously
outnumbered how many people do you
employ clearly he’s searching for some
kind of metric to gauge our competence
it could be how many pupils do you teach
how many products do you sell but why is
it important
it’s bigger always better does the
number of people you employ really
matter I don’t think so
not if you can leverage innovation in
fact I believe innovation can level the
playing field
I started in energy consultancy seven
years ago with four people we are now a
team of 17 and out of approximately 600
competitors nationally we’ve been
awarded the UK’s energy service firm of
the year the most trusted the most
innovative and recently energy
consultancy of the year but it hasn’t
been easy and I’d like to share with you
today what I’ve learnt about inspiring
innovation over the past seven years
before I go on though I’d like to make a
clear distinction the word innovation
gets used a lot and it can be confusing
innovation is not a product week it’s
not a new checklist or check box
these are improvements when it comes to
innovation imagination is the key to
unlocking a successful future don’t be
limited by what you currently know or
currently do forget what is and embrace
what if if it’s disruptive creative
challenging and a little bit scary then
you are on the right lines now I’d like
you to imagine a triangle and in one
point of that triangle we have hunger
for me in my former role I knew that
what we were doing could be done 1,000
times better
I wasn’t being listened to I was running
out of options and it was starting to
affect my health
physically and more importantly mentally
and so I had to find a better way for
myself now as I said I run an energy
consultancy we’re not a charity and
we’re not a social enterprise but when I
started my business it was with the
fierce belief that every single day with
every single decision we made we could
craft an exciting enjoyable and
fulfilling experience for myself my
colleagues our clients and the wider
business community that we engage with
hunger is deep it’s instinctual it
drives you forward and for me it’s much
much more than passion it’s a relentless
persistence a resourcefulness a steely
determination that what you are doing is
just right
it makes you work harder it makes you
study for longer and you trust it you
have to distill this hunger into your
vision your values your products your
brand your software everything ok back
to our triangle so in one at one point
we’ve got hunger and at another point we
have humans a hungry engaged optimistic
group of humans is a magical source of
innovation as adults we like to think of
ourselves as clever capable individuals
doing a good job which is great but when
we fail make mistakes or have poor
outcomes we either take this personally
or we look to blame others when
innovation has to come naturally it can
be plucked from the sky found in your
successes but I believe more often than
not it can be found in your failures and
these failures need to be guilt-free all
they’ll be swept under the carpet and
you’ll miss all the valuable nuggets of
innovation that are buried deep within
but creating a place where people feel
comfortable enough to hold up their hand
and say I messed up isn’t easy to
achieve so how do we do this
people need to feel safe and I believe
this is something that every
organization can do with working on and
that is acknowledging the positive
profit generation that good mental
health brings Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs encourages us to facilitate
self-actualization and personal growth
but arguably social collaboration and
connection are more important because
these are what underpin purpose
and in turn happiness you’re amazing
people deserve to be inspired and
supported they need to know what’s next
and they need to know where the journey
is taking them why because they are
directly forging the future with their
own ideas now none of this is
groundbreaking but what we have are a
group of individuals who see failure as
an opportunity to innovate and who are
always happy to contribute because
they’re heard and appreciated back to
our triangle so we have a hunger at one
point we have humans at another and the
final point is habitat coming up with
good ideas isn’t quite enough you need
to build an environment where they
become become real and the reality is it
actually needs to be someone’s
responsibility to bring these ideas to
life we are a team of just 17 people but
I believe in innovation so strongly that
we have always made a space for it we
have an innovation engineer whose sole
responsibility is making what we do
quicker and more efficient improvements
plus he captures all the sparks of true
innovation evaluates them presents them
and rolls them out some of the ideas
will fail and some will be for later but
when we get it right we really get it
right and that’s the innovation triangle
or what I like to call our do angle
because there is no trying these three
points will inspire more innovation and
in case you were wondering that man at
that table we won his business and when
he asked when we asked him what made us
stand out from our competition he said
your people the
answer almost always is people
it’s just our humans came bearing gifts
of innovation that they’ve had a hand in
crafting because they were hungry and
they were in a supportive habitat that
let those ideas breathe in the future
when you come up against your
competition you very well may be
outnumbered but just make sure you are never out gunned thank you