Good morning Grid Connections listeners.
Welcome back to Grid Connections, the podcast where we explore all things transportation, clean energy, and our power grid connecting all of these systems together.
In this episode, we sit down with Kim Getgen co-founder and CEO of InnovationForce to explore how innovation can be turned from a buzzword into a repeatable process, especially
in legacy industries like energy.
Kim shares the playbook for fostering a culture of innovation inside utilities, the importance of creating space for creative thinking and how AI is reshaping collaboration
across the grid.
I really enjoyed this conversation for a lot of different reasons, but it was really impressive to see what InnovationForce and InnovationWorks AI, allow
more projects deploy faster and be even more successful in the field.
This conversation is packed with practical insights for energy professionals, innovators, and anyone curious about how bold ideas actually gain traction in complex industries.
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With that, enjoy.
I'm excited to be speaking with you today, Kim.
Thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having us.
So Kim, just in case people aren't familiar with you and what your company does, can you just give us a quick kind of background and overview of you and the company and then we'll
start kind of getting more into the products and other service that your team's working on.
Yeah, no.
So InnovationForce is a SaaS, AI-driven SaaS platform.
We worked specifically in the energy industry to help utilities innovate faster.
So one of the things you'll hear me talk about is how we remove barriers in the innovation workflow, particularly piloting.
So if you're in an energy space, whether you are a utility or a supplier selling to a utility, there's no way around
pilotitis.
Everybody is stuck in some form of how do we pilot things for the first time inside of utility service territory to not only prove the business value of what it is that new
widget is going to do for the utility, but also make sure that's going to deliver safe, affordable, and reliable.
We cannot continue to take multi-year pilot cycles.
is 2025.
So much of this grid modernization and transformation that we predicted would that would happen by 2030 is getting crammed in now into the last five years of this this decade.
And we have a great opportunity, I think, in front of us as a result of some technology and tools and best practice to actually deliver on the promise of grid modernization.
pilot more effectively, more efficiently, just adopt more of this emerging technology that's going to make the grid more modern, affordable, and clean for everybody.
And so that's what InnovationForce is all about.
That's why we got started.
We got started in the early days when we got founded working with Portland General Electric.
So I'll talk a little bit more about that, Chase, in the interview, but just shout out to Portland General Electric.
A lot of your listeners will probably think of them as
an innovator and all of the cool stuff that they're doing, but not just in the EV front, like across their entire grid mod program, what they're doing for their rollout, their
virtual power plant.
And I think they're a great example of the art of possible for utilities driving innovation, not only in an accelerated fashion, but affordably, like their program makes
sense.
And it's something we can all copy model our programs after.
So that's how InnovationForce got started and yeah, we are 100 % in the energy industry trying to this grid mod piece forward.
Yeah.
And I think, you meant you kind of mentioned a really good, great thing with a lot of these new projects, which is the pilot phase, but you also kind of mentioned like so many
pilots on a lot of really interesting and, fascinating technology get kicked off and then they can either kind of go a lot slower than I think a lot of people are hoping for or
kind of expecting to see.
So I would kind of like, kind of love to learn a little bit more about some of those challenges.
And then just kind of more broader, for our listeners, just like, what are some of the challenges and like for the industry that, innovation force really focuses on and helps
with.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that sounds great.
And so the pilot process, why I do think it's important that we start here.
Most of the time when utilities are thinking about adopting emerging technology, new technology to do this cool grid mod stuff, they all know it's going to take a pilot cycle.
And more and more today, these new technologies are coming from startups.
They're coming from new companies that maybe the utility has never heard of.
They may have never worked with them.
They may be from a very reliable source like Energy Impact Partner Portfolio, a National Grid Ventures Partner Portfolio.
So we know that there's a utility standing behind it, but that
initial utility has never tried out that idea yet.
And so the pilot process is super important.
Now, when we work with more startups and their emerging technology, the other thing to consider is startups decision-making process and sense of urgency is much different than
utilities.
So while utilities may be thinking, hey, a two-year pilot would be okay for us, a startup could run out of runway because their cycles, their funding cycles are gonna come in 12 to
18 months.
And so something that I just find personally fascinating about this whole industry, and when I talk to a lot of
my peers that are running corporate venture groups within utilities.
The first thing that needs to happen is this understanding and alignment that if we're going to adopt new more of this new technology from startups, we have to align to faster
decision making processes.
We have to help make sure this new emerging technology does not die on the runway.
What we need to recognize is that utilities do not develop most utilities, especially those that are in regulated parts of the country will
not develop this technology at risk.
We do not have capital I level innovation budgets at a utility.
Our only option is to partner with our with a usually a startup.
who has been able to get venture-backed funds to be able to build this new technology.
But that venture-backed fund, even when you see these amazing press releases like, companies so-and-so just got $3 million in funding and $5 million of funding, that funding
will last them 12 months.
Right.
we have to figure out ways to accelerate the decision-making process, the scouting process, how we're going to collaborate, do it in ways that allows us to reduce risk as an
industry, and then pile it faster so that not only can we decide if we're gonna fund production at scale, that would be helpful for the startup to close their deals and get
access to more capital.
But we just have to do this in a more efficient way, or what you're going to see is at the heart of all of this, the most innovative companies die on the vine.
And that's what I think has been the struggle that I've seen over the last decade.
I think energy is one of the most difficult companies.
I'm a two-time founder.
I was in cybersecurity before energy.
One of the things that I was drawn to this industry was because how challenging it was.
If you are a founder creating a new thing in the energy industry that we so desperately need to meet safe, affordable, reliable, and clean.
your entrepreneur journey, can tell you will be the hardest entrepreneur journey of any of your peers.
So keep doing the hard work we need you and utilities please, you know, understand that your startups that are getting the venture-backed dollars to do your R &D need your help.
Yeah, I think that's a great call out because having worked in a lot of the startup space and then when you talk to utility professionals two years ago in a utility world like
that's that's moving quick.
That's gonna be a short timeframe.
And then in startups, we say, well, the company could have pivoted twice within those two years and the pilot they started versus the services they may offer at the end of it could
be completely different.
And I think that's a really
Good call out.
mean, that that's why it's so important to have kind of like that very clear project scope and what the pilot is trying to accomplish and make sure you have that alignment.
But I think you're like spot on with how important that is to have those goals and kind of the needs of both companies agreed upon and just having that transparency between the two.
You know, what, one other thing, I guess, kind of with my previous background or kind of some professional work in the star of space as well.
You mentioned a background in cybersecurity and I am always surprised, maybe sometimes horrified about the lack of some of those things that you see in this industry that really
do need that help.
And I would maybe love to hear just a little bit of like doing more in this space now.
What are some of the things, especially companies that work with you or things that you would love to see to kind of help make sure we have that kind of level of.
cyber safety that may be needed in quite a few areas, honestly, in my opinion.
yeah, no, and it goes hand in hand with pilotitis because one of the most common objections you're going to hear as you start to move a new idea through the procurement
process will be, well, timeout, we've got to get our cybersecurity team involved with is absolutely the right thing to do.
But cybersecurity teams I find in utilities are completely under resourced because this is a very difficult, you know, this high talent, very difficult, you know, talent to drive
and bring into utilities.
cybersecurity.
But if you look at what's happening to the grid, everything's becoming digitized.
Standards are becoming, you know, all these proprietary ways of doing grid modernization are becoming standardized.
You know, we're layering OT and IT on top of everything that was SCADA.
And so we are opening ourselves up for sure to, you know, a lot of cyber threats and attacks.
not just cyber wise, but also in our supply chains, right?
So there's just a lot of focus right now on cybersecurity, which I completely agree with.
So we've run, the way we figure out what the utility is focused on is we read and download all the grid mod filings from utilities around the world, but particularly here in North
America.
we've been, our AI tool and our Innovation Works AI has been reading all of the grid mod filings.
and then it'll develop challenges that the industry is facing.
This cyber challenge, we're seeing more cyber challenges as a result of those grid mod reports than ever before.
And so I would say to my friends in the cybersecurity space, which I have a lot of, I know a lot of really great VCs in the cybersecurity space that have been afraid to put their
toe in the utility industry or have said, we specifically went into cyber because we didn't want to get into the utility space.
This is the time that cyber and energy are coming together.
We've been predicting this for decades and it is now here.
So there are more opportunities in my opinion for cybersecurity startups in the energy and utility industry than ever before.
We absolutely need you.
But then on the other hand, inside utilities, those of you who are wearing the risk hat, please, please, please consider how do you want your pilots to roll?
Because if you...
prepare your procurement and cyber teams for this pipeline of new technology that will need to be reviewed.
Don't let it slow you down.
That was one of, it was one of the running jokes when I started talking to utilities, you know, a couple of years ago about innovation and everyone was like, well, it takes me
three years just to get the idea through cyber.
And then another five years to pilot it, right?
But that's not the case anymore.
Like I'm seeing so much more success now where
Cyber teams are getting better staffed, but they're also, we're creating these standardized process and forms and questionnaires so that startups are familiar with what
they need to get through the review.
And cybersecurity teams are really smart now about what needs to be flagged for higher levels of risk.
and there's a lot of these pilots that are going through that, you know, we say it's not flagging any.
real cyber risk.
like, don't let that stand in the way of piloting faster.
And I think the big wake up call for a lot of cyber cyber companies, a lot of maybe not cyber companies, but a wake up call for a lot of startups that they haven't considered the
just the level of cybersecurity insurance that you need to have to be able to do business here.
So just suck it up, get the cybersecurity insurance, get your, you know, socks compliance.
Get that in check.
On your side, hire a really good cyber person.
Do your penetration task.
Do everything that you need to do to make the cybersecurity procurement process go as seamlessly as possible.
Because there is no way around that bottleneck.
You might have the best grid mod invention that we've ever seen, but if your cybersecurity audit fails, your idea is dead.
No, I appreciate it.
I think that those are great call outs.
and I really enjoy kind of how you're positioning it, that those are the things that I think more proactively people in the space on both sides.
But I think it has been really interesting to watch the evolution on the utility side too, about being more, open to the speed and kind of working with that, but also just having
that transparency of these are what the base needs are.
And, it is in the consumer's best interest.
So it's all things that it's pretty hard to push back on, but let's, guess, let's move forward and then kind of talk about innovation force itself and kind of some of the
specific things, not only is it addressing, but also kind of how your tools, especially on the AI side is really making it easier for utilities and just kind of the whole scope of
what your team's working on.
Yeah, yeah.
So InnovationForce, we got started because we put in place this process that I was mentioning and we worked with Portland General Electric.
They had created a pretty large 5G lab to run around 100 plus use cases through a 5G lab to enable a virtual power plant.
With that amount of pipeline coming through that lab, it became important for us to talk to the rest of the business around how we were going to innovate.
so putting together that corporate governance structure around procurement, when does cyber get involved?
What does a cybersecurity assessment checklist look like?
What sort of transparent partnerships do we want to put together because we know we're going to be working with more cutting edge startups.
So we want to be able to get them through our procurement process, but be able to work with them.
These were all process decisions that needed to be made and standardized so that that utility could drive volume, quantity and quality is really what they wanted to measure.
And so the first thing we did was we said, look, innovation is not about the aha moment on a whiteboard or brainstorming meeting or a post-it in a Miro whiteboard.
It is the process of running a discipline, repeatable, standardized way of innovating so that all of the innovators that are getting involved in this process, whether they're
internal or external, know step by step what's the next step in the process, but what do they need to do to complete each step in the process.
So imagine that part of our platform is just a workflow automation tool.
It's a SaaS-based tool.
works very similar to CRM type technology, where we get pretty used to being able to run flows and workflows.
But it's 100 % purpose-built for innovation, and it incorporates 20 years of best practice from the findings of my co-founder, Dr.
Linda Hill, who is a Harvard Business School professor and wrote the book Collective Genius and has assessed over 150 of the most innovative companies in the world.
And when she wrote her book, Collective Genius, think one thing, like the title sounds really great and it sounds really sexy.
But one of her findings was, successful leaders of innovation do the boring stuff right.
It's about a disciplined process that we can repeat that's standardized and able to scale.
So that, number one, was what we wanted to build in our technology through SAS, make it simple, make it easy.
make it easy to scale so we could then reach all of these thousands and thousands of innovators that you have to work with in the process of innovating or piloting.
So that was step one, work full automation.
We also built performance dashboards.
These were really based on Portland's desire to be able to measure quantity, measure quality, throughput of their pipeline.
So they're measuring the number of ideas, how long each idea takes per each stage of the workflow.
And they're also looking at how many minutes to man hours, if you will, does each task in the innovation flow take their employees.
So we give them all this incredible data back in their recent innovation impact report that they've published that summarizes this whole program.
And I would encourage everybody to download it because it has the complete corporate governance framework and
how it works and whether you use our platform or not, it's a great tool.
But we were able to estimate that we were saving them $562,000 per workflow because we were measuring how long each person's task would take before and after.
So imagine workflow automation, everything being standardized, corporate governance standardized, risk is now being reduced.
Innovators know what to do.
So it's less meeting time, less, less time overall for them in the whole flow.
And then the last piece that we just added on with distribute tech, and this was a long time coming after about more than 12 months of getting feedback from the entire industry
to say, how can we help you as an industry innovate faster was our innovation works AI tool.
And so the AI, it goes out and it reads all those grid mod reports.
it generates challenges from the reports and in under 20 seconds can auto match a challenge to a marketplace of solution ideas that we've put together.
it's basically an open marketplace that anybody, can get a free account.
let, know, everybody can come in to be able to look at the ideas, the challenges and the solutions that we've gathered.
But what's so cool is being able to watch utilities.
take their grid mod report that could be 600 pages, run it through to say what innovation challenges should we be working on?
And in 20 seconds or less get matched to viable solutions that they may or may not have heard of.
So we've just taken all of that research time, scouting time out and it's real time.
You can do it whenever you feel like you don't have to wait for a conference now to go.
And by the way, who's gonna talk to 500 vendors at a conference?
Like you're not.
So imagine being able to run your grid mod report and see what it matched to.
You're probably going to find a lot of providers that were at Distribute Tech that you didn't get a chance to meet up with.
And now you can through our platform.
Well, I think that's a great, point actually.
mean, before we went live, we were just talking about how exhausted and how much like we were doing at our own.
Like you were a distributor tech.
was at EV charging summit and I was, I was speaking.
I was going to some of these workshops.
mean, and when I have like a few spare minutes, I would go to the expo and see like some of the actual vendors there.
And there were easily hundreds and I'd maybe met, I would say rounding up 20 and,
Exactly.
And so like having that kind of level to it is really impressive and really powerful just to have that kind of as a consistent level versus like, you're saying, not only going to
one of these events, but having to wait till the next one and being in all this.
So that I think is a really cool level to this.
kind of like maybe taking a step back for those listening, like whether they're in the industry or not, can you kind of share from like what the utility side would be like, who
is it at a project manager?
Who is it on the utility side?
That's like,
this is the perfect light would be using this and kind of implementing this as I go through that process.
Yeah, no, I'll walk you through and really base a lot of what
this example is really on Portland and they talk about it in their impact report like what happened, why did they do it and all of this has been third party assessed by EPRI by the
way so EPRI was there as well trying to help advise them on what they should do for their innovation program.
So at the very beginning it really takes C-level support.
While we talk to a lot of innovators on the ground on both sides of the marketplace the startups and the utilities the suppliers and the demand side this doesn't move forward
very well if you don't
have top level support.
In the example of Portland, it came all the way from the board down due to a regulation driver.
So they were to deliver, I believe it was 80 percent clean electricity by 2030.
And so because of that, they knew their grid was going to have to look dramatically different.
And so that they would have to encourage their frontline teams to start innovating, piloting, looking for new ideas.
But at the board level down, it received top
down support and there was a very strong executive champion.
Many of your listeners have probably heard of or know Larry Bekodal, the Senior Vice President of Advanced Energy Delivery at Portland, but he was tapped to really drive the
innovation program.
And that's who we have been working with very closely as an executive champion.
And so I would say, you know, it does take top down support.
It does require a strong executive champion.
the executive champion is going to provide air cover for the strategy, help remove barriers when it comes to the bureaucracy, creating that corporate governance structure,
making sure that that process is going to work for the company, the reporting metrics, how do we want to report out success to the board, any incentives you might want to put in
place, like that strong executive championship.
Below that, then it gets tapped.
to a driver.
That driver could be the head of R &D, it could be the head of innovation management, it could be the head of digital transformation.
It really doesn't matter, but it does require someone that the entire organization can kind of go to wearing that recognized hat.
That if you have a question about the innovation program, I'm here to answer it for you.
And I'm here to make sure that the process is working.
Like I'm taking as much friction
as I possibly can in a safe way out of that process and working with all lines of business to make sure that risk is being managed appropriately.
Below the Innovation Manager, what we have seen work really well is a decentralized model.
This might be a little bit different from what a lot of folks have seen in the past because I think what we've seen have been large organizations like utility outsource their
innovation.
They may outsource it to an incubator, an accelerator, a consulting group.
Now, what I'm starting to see is more of this hands-on approach that you're going to either do both or you're going to move to this decentralized model where your business
unit leaders who are in charge of new ideas are going to spearhead what we've called airports.
These are strategic areas of the business that you're trying to drive innovation through.
people inside of your business unit might be tapped as captains to pilot test flights.
So we've kind of worked it around this air traffic control analogy, which has been great.
as well.
love I love that analogy.
Kind of the overlap between the two industries.
That's great.
and it works really well because it takes some of the design thinking jargon away and it's more accessible.
You don't need a PhD in design thinking to be able to run this.
We're going to help you run your, know, captain your best test flight ever.
We can have a lot of fun with it too.
We can gamify it as well, compare airports to each other, you know, are your flights landing on time?
Are they getting delayed?
Like that whole analogy just...
And it also helps to differentiate your innovation program from your other programs here.
So you may have a very mature and formalized product development process or a very formalized and mature project at scale, CAPEX project at scale process.
And they're all using stage gates that are going to sound somewhat similar.
But by calling your innovation program and using this air traffic control analogy a little bit differently,
as the phase zero and feeder system into these more mature processes, it allows us to not step on each other's toes.
We don't wanna take away 10 to 20 years of maturity in your product development process or in your putting stuff in the ground to go to scale.
We don't wanna take that away from the utility, but what we are standing up is a new thing.
And what Portland had a lot of fun and just kind of branded around this innovation air traffic control analogy.
And so people knew that it was like, yeah, we're talking about strategic innovation.
And we're trying to alleviate fear.
We're trying to make it more fun.
We're trying to make it more accessible.
yeah, so I would say, so all of those things got put into place.
But when you really see the magic happen in this decentralized model, the frontline innovators feel
encouraged to participate.
And this is really why we started InnovationForce, like to get back to your earlier answer.
For so many years, for 20 years of being in commercialization and innovation, I have seen way too many times where innovation was given to the strategic thought leader or the high
performers or we took a group of people out and siloed them away from the rest of the business and put them in a
fake garage and hope they would come up with some new idea and the rest of the workforce, those of us on the front line seeing problems every day, like we were taken out of that
process.
And so no surprise when your high performers who've been working in a garage for eight months come back with an idea and hand it over to the crew as this beautiful new idea on a
tablet that they should be using and the crew goes, did anyone talk to us?
Like my iPhone was working just fine for this.
Like what?
We didn't need all that.
So that's why 80 % of digital transformation and higher fails today, because we silo it off and we exclude the people closest to the problem.
In our model, what you're able to do is have a very centralized hand on oversight, corporate governance, risk managed approach, but empower your frontline to come into the
process, know what steps they need to do to participate in the process, and completely
expand this across your entire employee base.
I saw people at Portland light up when they realized that they were included.
I literally heard on a call one day with a person who was out in the field a lot who had asked us to check out, actually it was a really cool EV company, can't remember the exact
one at the time, but it was an EV fleet management fleet solution.
And she had said, yeah, I...
I didn't know if you wanted me to participate in this, but I'm happy to give you some feedback because we invited her in for feedback call.
She goes, has anybody checked this company out?
And we were like, no, no.
Like run, run, run with that.
Not only run with that, like tap her to lead that project, right?
So I have so many great heartwarming stories like that where then the innovation becomes owned by the employees.
Your success rate goes up.
At Portland in their impact report, think they grew their portfolio by over 330 % and 50 % of their ideas going through our process are now greenlit.
That's a really high number for the adoption.
Well, you know, there's a lot you just said that I really like and I have my own kind of anecdote, but I think you brought up, you brought up two really great points about like
when it comes to digital transformations, it's not having the right people involved, especially those in the day.
And then just making like the concept and what you're trying to achieve as approachable.
And, recently I was talking to someone and they, the whole six Sigma, they were talking about how they're a black belt in this.
And I get it.
And I think there's a lot of interesting business,
Thoughts and stuff you can use with that but if you're being talked to about all of this and all this transform Like it's the jargon of it is so off-putting Whereas just using
using a simple and cap inviting thing instead of having to like learn someone else's jargon Just using like the example of just like air traffic under like everyone does that
really quick and that's not really the focus of it That's just to try and make it more approachable understandable so people can communicate effectively
and actually do the important stuff, is that transformation.
So that's awesome.
them to do that because it's hard.
It's hard to lead innovation.
A lot of people are fearful.
But creating that safe place where innovation is about piloting and learning and learning fast or failing fast, if you're comfortable saying fail fast, some aren't.
Some want to say learn fast.
But just know, just because we've simplified everything to this air traffic control doesn't mean it is not based on 20 years of Harvard Business School-backed research.
It is.
and for sure.
Right.
But I think that, yeah, no, exactly.
And I, that's what I like about it is it, makes it really approachable and you can't have kind of that data in those learnings, but it isn't just like, I was reminded once again,
just talking to this person, like how you have to almost have like a thesaurus or dictionary of what these terms mean and what they can actually translate to.
I was like, other than for that, to be honest, that person's ego may be.
Great.
find that it was like, was like, okay, great.
I'm happy for you that you've achieved that in your career.
But like as an organization and like for that greater good that you're trying to achieve, I mean, it's like dealing with acronyms or all these other things that like create
barriers when at the end of the exactly, exactly.
yeah, and what we like to say, everybody can be a chief problem officer.
Why wouldn't you want everyone to be empowered to be a chief problem officer?
be closest to the problem, solve the problem.
And then you start to build this amazing DNA in your culture for being able to be growth mindset and innovative mindset.
And so to turn some of it, like we haven't talked about this chase, but I'm sure this one's coming too.
Like everyone wants to talk about culture and utilities having a quote unquote bad culture for innovating or, you know, all of those barriers we chatted about can kind of paint
utilities as laggards or not wanting to create culture.
The other huge finding that Linda Hill, my co-founder, had in Collective Genius, that culture is not the determining factor for your innovation program.
There are capabilities that you can learn and do in the process of innovating that is going to make your culture better.
And I cannot stress this enough.
So if you are able to get more people involved in the program,
show them the capabilities that they need to have to be able to drive an idea through, the culture overall will start to organically improve.
And when you start to build that organic change in your culture, you attract better talent, you're going to attract more growth, you're going to find more savings, you're
going to be able to deliver faster.
And so you get better.
have those, you get those people on the field, like they're already really busy trying to do all these other things.
And then you're asking them to be a big part of this change, which you do need them to be.
But you also need to kind of remove those barriers and that friction for them to really be able to voice that, get that feedback and then iterate.
And so I just, I think this is all really interesting and I like how there is the.
different levels of engagement, the simplicity and the openness to like how people at all the different levels can engage.
And that's on the culture side.
And like you're saying, it can actually grow and kind of facilitate its own culture for that organization and make it even better.
but then that pairs to the software and the pilot that you're doing.
That is just really the main part of the change.
because Larry told me early on, he's like, don't give engineers another tool.
Like don't just build software and give them another tool.
Here's something special that happens when humans collaborate.
that's so innovation works is a platform.
It's just a tool, but we are putting in the teachings, the training, the wisdom, the knowledge to be able to upskill employees to become chief problem officers as well.
Your culture will improve.
All this great stuff will improve.
But I did want to give my dad a little bit of a shout out.
So I don't know those of you
were at Distribute Tech, I a lot of people saw, I put a little post up that my dad and I, for the first time, my dad came with me to Distribute Tech and he spent his career in
building automations and controls.
And so he was in the field, he was in the field crew.
So he wore one of those blue shirts, sometimes I call it blue shirt syndrome when we stopped listening to the people closest to the problem.
And this was the story of him, his long career as an HVAC controls guy where...
you know, he was closest to the customer and he had a ton of great ideas on how to deliver better to the customer.
No one in corporate wanted to hear that, right?
And so I was like, it's ingrained in me pretty early that that was something that I just saw it over and over myself.
And I thought, wow, if we could build this platform and make sure everybody that field knowledge is included in participating in the innovation process, you overcome the number
one barrier that all the CEOs say to me, which is like,
I'll do this when you tell me how I can get my field to say no, stop saying no to innovation.
It's it's real simple.
Invite them in.
Yeah.
No, this, this has been great.
And I, think it, it is just a lot of different levels of having that.
I just think it's so, in some ways, part of the reason I even started my own consulting is kind of being that this exact reason is like that jadedness where it's like, okay, the
answers are very clear.
You just, if you spend a couple of days usually in the field or on the front lines, you can see where that friction is.
And this needs to get up.
And I think if you look at a lot of the
more effective startups kind in the space that have been able to scale, it is having that quick iteration.
And, and I really enjoy the kind of the anecdote and the connection to all of this that you shared there, but we've kind of talked about a few of these already.
And I'm just curious if there are any other barriers to grid modernization and specifically how your platform kind of helps overcome the budgets.
If there's any others in general that you're seeing that maybe we haven't hit on yet.
Yeah, no, I think there's probably two.
One is start with the challenge.
And then the second is time is actually your biggest barrier.
Like time is the silent killer of all innovation.
So I'll talk about time first, because this might be a little controversial and, you know, feel free to disagree with me, send us your comments or your, you know, push back.
It'd be great to get a dialogue started here, but
When I do talk to utilities, the first thing they'll say is we don't have the resources or the budget.
I like to say you always have a resource, because if you have somebody with a really good idea that they care about most of the time, nine times out of 10, they're willing to be
that resource to give it a trial, like to run the test.
So there you go.
You've got an active resource right there.
It's already on your payroll.
And that only needs to take a certain percentage of their current time to be able to go and run that pilot.
half of the time they want to do it because it's going to be a benefit to them.
It's going to give them probably some benefit back, which is why they want to champion it.
The second is budget.
And I understand, know budgets are tight.
R &D budgets are super tight these days.
We don't have enough money to run all the pilots that we want to run.
But again, these startups are usually willing to do a pilot free if you give them a 90 day decision or you say to them, I can make a decision on this in 120 days or 180 days so that
they can then make sure that they're able to fund and resource their own runway appropriately.
So there you go.
You can pilot a lot of this for free.
You can, think at Portland, they called it $1 hamburgers because we were doing a lot of $1 pilots because there was so much collaboration and willingness for these new startups to
bring new ideas that they knew would be piloted fast and they would get a decision.
By the way, utilities, when you tell a startup, no, but give them great feedback, that's great product market fit.
People will give away pilots free all day to get real feedback on their products so they know if they're building something right.
And if they're building something wrong and they're told why they can go and fix that, that's a problem we can fix.
What we can't fix is lack of transparency and no feedback and then waiting around forever for people to make a decision.
So there you go.
So you have built in resources, you have built in budget by partnering in a smart way.
So time, time turns out to be the silent killer.
The longer an idea sits on a shelf without a decision, the more likely it is for people to kill it.
And sometimes bad, you know, not bad ideas, but you know, sometimes ideas do need to be killed.
There's nothing wrong with killing decisions.
In fact, Linda worked with them.
Do it fast.
And yeah, like Linda, that's one thing she, so she tells a story about one of the, one of the large corporations she worked with.
They gave budgets to, they gave incentives back to the innovation person, like the person who brought the idea and killed their own idea.
Got a bonus, you know, for being able to say, this
killing my own idea.
That positive good culture, good capabilities.
So yeah, I think the real aha moment for me was just seeing when ideas, what happens when the ideas have the long shelf life, you start getting misaligned with your strategic
objective.
You start getting misaligned with your North Star.
because your North Star mission may change.
And if that widget is sitting out there for three years and now the North Star mission has changed, what's going on?
Like that was a complete waste of time.
So the sooner you can get ideas through a process with real learnings, which by the way, are where the value is, real learning, real feedback, it's good for startups, it's good
for the utility, and then it keeps you in alignment.
with working on those strategic objectives that you have probably told your customers you were going to meet in your grid mod plan, in your IRP, in your wildfire mitigation plan.
And so with all of this innovation sitting in these plans and we filed them with our commissions, you know, we, the onus is on us to be able to get these things piloted and
decisions made faster.
Even if we decide not to move through with it, you know, we deserve an answer back on why.
So time is a silent killer, that are stale will not scale, I like to say.
So yeah, I think I stole it too.
So I shouldn't really get myself credit for it, but yeah.
Well, I know we've kind of talked about a lot of this or kind of some of the things that have come out from using it, but I guess the term AI, it has been used a lot.
but there, there are definitely wins with it.
And I, I'd be kind of curious just with your, technology specifically, like how does AI and the tools play a role really?
And like I said, we've kind of talked around this, but like specifically filter and maybe prioritize technology.
ideas within the utility industry and like with some of these wins I mean are if I was a product manager at PG or any utility like what as I'm trying to implement this like how
does the AI kind of maybe accelerate with this faster learning that maybe we haven't covered yet specific
this is great, because it gets me to the second point around start with the challenge.
So the two key learnings was times really the silent killer.
And when innovation goes wrong, a lot of times it's because we didn't really start with the challenge because we're so busy.
We're so busy.
We get so excited.
We come back from a show, we get shiny object syndrome.
go to a pitch competition.
We hear about a startup, you know, and then we want to come back.
And it was like, well, where is that problem inside of our organization?
So this is where the AI came in handy for us, because after talking to utilities, 12 months last year, we wanted them to start with the challenge.
gave them a great formula to be able to
generate challenge statements.
And then many of them just kind of took me aside and they're like, Kim, know, like I'm too, I'm too busy.
My team's too busy.
I don't even know where to get a good challenge statement from.
Like this was actually the Achilles heel was a challenge statement.
But then they would all also tell me I've noticed that when we don't use your process and start with the challenge, that idea fails.
And when I haven't, done nothing different to the idea, but I've moved it through your process for whatever reason it works.
I'm like, cause you started with the problem.
So then, you know, after hearing this for many months and talking to a lot of people, I started to think about like, do we really have to write the challenges for this industry
on gridmod?
Like surely we know them, that they exist somewhere.
And my sinking suspicion, my hunch was, yeah, they exist in the filings.
We are a regulated industry that we have a lot of paperwork we file.
And my suspicion was, I bet a lot of these innovation challenges are in the filings, the filings that we've spent so much time and energy and money building.
So what if we just started with the filing?
Let's start with the grid mod filing.
So I started running grid mod reports, integrated resource plans.
I looked at welfare
communication plans, just general rate cases.
There's just a lot of really good sources of publicly available data.
I got our AI tool to start to learn through an innovator's lens, how would you create a really good challenge from a 600 page document?
By the way, because I was doing this manually and that was another thing.
If my utility customer is not going to do it, they're asking me to do it.
Reading one of those filings and then trying to figure out the challenge statement and then getting it through.
coming up with the original.
That, yeah, that would take me, I want to say 40 man hours of time at a minimum.
But if I was even using my co-pilot, like let's say I was just using co-pilot myself, or I was badged in as an employee at a utility and I use their co-pilot, it was still a good 20
man hours of work.
per document, even teaching that AI how to go grab the challenges.
So then we were like, okay, well, that's still a lot of time.
So what if, what if we could build this InnovationWorks AI tool that would be really, really smart and fast at reading all these filings?
And that's what we did.
And so there were a lot of technical hurdles we ran into, but finally, what we launched at Distribute Tech was the ability to upload any file.
It just has to be a PDF.
We don't even care if it's your filing, it be a strategy document, whatever.
It's in your own private workspace.
You can upload that document.
We'll tell you what challenges we find.
And then you click a button that says match me to solutions.
And then it crawls our database and then it returns the matches of the solutions that we have found that we've found like cataloged in our, in our marketplace.
So that
The initial reading of the PDF can take anywhere between a minute to two minutes, crunching through that couple hundred pages, transparency.
And there was some interesting technology hurdles we ran into just there, trying to get it to read the full document or not time out or, know, there's just a variety of technical
things and then be able to find a match in seconds.
And so what will return are the top five matches that we find.
in under 20 seconds and you can click the button again and again and it can keep matching you.
But when it returns the result, it will tell you what the challenge statement is, what the solution overview to that challenge is and why we think it's a match, speaking in energy
vernacular.
So this AI has almost become a really smart energy agent that speaks like it'll
It'll say BTM, it'll, you this is a great BTM solution.
If you're trying to do a VPP, it's just been so much fun to watch it get smarter.
The more grid mod reports it's reading, the more solutions it's evaluating, the more data it's analyzing and synthesizing, and the better we're able to make it with our algorithm
and telling it why something's a good match or an okay match.
We'll try to return the top five matches that we have in our database.
we'll tell you if it's a great match, if it's an okay match, or if it's a partial match.
And so we're still in the process of getting feedback.
We just launched it at Distribute Tech, but to be able to go from like months of man hour time down to three minutes or less, and then imagine being able to do that across.
So we put all Distribute Tech exhibitors in the platform.
So if you didn't go to Distribute Tech, you didn't have time to hit those 500,
upload your grid mod plan and we'll match you to the best solutions and I can guarantee you a lot of them are probably at the show.
Yeah, and I think that's super impressive and it really goes back to that kind of conversation we've had about time and speed by being able to just cut out so much time and
kind of get these things to move faster.
We do obviously have a lot of listeners who are more on kind of the electric charging electric kind of that automotive side versus maybe the grid side.
So I would just like to unpack a little further.
So in that example, I think that's really cool.
But for those listening who may not be as familiar with that use case, like a match, what does that mean?
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, totally.
So when we read the reports, and it could be an EV report, but we read the report.
There are many challenges, a lot of fleet management challenges, fleet management charging challenges that we're seeing, single residents, multi-residents, know, there seems to be a
bit buzzworthy these days, but we'll go through and we'll create the challenge and then match it to an available supplier solution.
Many of your listeners may not even know that we've already cataloged their solution in our platform.
So you may be getting an email from us
It works a little bit like, you know, if you're familiar with Crunchbase or PitchBook, how they create a profile in your company from publicly available information.
We've crawled through different suppliers websites that we've identified as solving a problem in the gridmod space.
Our AI tool has synthesized an overview for that solution.
And that's what's getting matched to the challenge.
And so if it's an EV fleet management charging for single residents, single home residences, we'll try
to match you to those solutions that we've seen.
We have already ingested portfolios, so Energy Impact Partners portfolio, National Grid Ventures portfolio, Incubate Energy Labs has this incredible database.
If you guys haven't checked it out, I highly recommend it.
But of all the years of that program, they have hundreds and hundreds of startups that have gone through it.
All of these companies, we crawl their original publicly available website to synthesize
size of their solution, match it to challenges, and we're now in the process of alerting all of those solvers that they have a match pending in our platform.
And they can take control of their profile.
They can create their own, what we call test flights.
You can create your own test flights.
You can edit your own.
profile that we've created on your behalf, or you can use our AI tool and upload your data sheet, for example, or your brochure.
the AI will then, the output of the AI will say, here's the solution overview, here's your competitive advantage.
This is why you're unique versus what we've seen in the market.
That no that that's super helpful and I appreciate kind of sharing that context with it I know we've talked a lot about grid modernization specifically, but when you go to your
guys website you show a lot more other things kind of like electric distribution power generation and power transmission I mean if you can't look at the Venn diagram all of
those have a little bit to be with grid modernization, but Looking at those other ones.
I realize we're getting close to time.
But how do those?
differ maybe
And how can you help with those areas, especially with like power generation and transmission?
Yeah, so for us, we're just trying to categorize what we've seen in the grid.
I keep saying grid mod reports, but it's really filings.
we're so, you know, we've taken everything from like decarbonization plan, sustainability plan, infrastructure.
There's a lot of infrastructure modernization plans.
Some of them may have been published by a utility.
Others may have been published by a government.
So really what we're trying to do is categorize all of the challenges that we've seen.
that now fall into transmission, distribution, mobility.
So we have a whole EV section, smart cities.
We're starting to build up smart cities.
So we'll start seeing some smart street lighting, smart traffic.
So yeah, we're just categorizing everything we've seen and then building matchmaking algorithms to be able to connect the best challenges to solutions.
And then pretty soon we'll be ingesting completed pilots.
There's a lot of open source material on pilots that have been completed.
So we'll be able to match those and we'll also be able to match innovators to each other.
So if you identify yourself as an innovator in EV charging, you could be matched to other innovators in that category.
That's super helpful and I really appreciate that.
Yeah, no, no, that, cause it, if they all connect together and you kind of need them together.
need them all together.
yeah, people laugh because they're like, you're going to know, you know, and about, they're like, this time next year, you're probably going to have the entire ecosystem
mapped for, for, for electricity.
You're going to know every single innovation challenge.
You're going to know.
And I'm like, yeah, like we're going to be, we want to be the one stop easy shop.
for people to come and find a challenge, see who's working on that challenge, find solutions, who landed those test flights, and cut out all of that indecision time.
That's why we've seen so many good ideas fail.
That's great.
as we're kind of wrapping up here, I, I know we've kind of talked to a lot about, how your platform works on it, but specifically like what are some of the long-term impacts you're
seeing of like adopt adopting AI driven innovation, in the energy sector, and then maybe any advice you'd give to any utility companies or others who have been hesitant to adopt
as well.
Yeah, no, I based on, you I had to start by using the tool by doing it manually and then now being able to develop this in a commercial grade product.
I would say run, don't walk.
If you're a utility and you're using Co-Pilot today, there's absolutely no reason why you can't train Co-Pilot to be able to read your filings and come up with these challenges the
same way we've done them.
You're also more than welcome to use ours, right?
Or Innovation Force is more than happy to partner with utilities to put our wrapper around your
your long language model of choice.
So it does not have to be necessarily ours.
We can use yours and train it how to be able to deliver the same amazing.
results we're seeing in like the next five to 10 years.
In the field of innovation, think AI has delivered like this really great capability that's helping us save so much time on the research, the scouting, the challenge statement
generation, being able to match challenges to viable solutions and being able to complete workflow.
So as you start to build your argument around why you should be piloting something and answering those questions in the workflow, AI can easily answer those for you.
But it doesn't take away the human component and innovation still remains a team sport, you know.
willingness to collaborate is key.
What I like to say is we're the AI assist for the human loop.
The human loop of piloting and innovating will never go away, but you can use AI as a very powerful assist.
We'll also be bringing into our platform the 20 years of research that our co-founder Linda Hill has done in a chat bot so that she's the innovation guide.
So instead of having to pick up the phone and calling an expensive consultant.
you could get really great advice just coming right from a chat bot or an AI tool.
My inspiration for that was very similar to the mental health awareness apps out there, where it's like, who knew you could chat with AI on the other end of a mental health
awareness app and get some really great advice?
I was like, why couldn't we do that for innovation?
And so five years from now, 2030, it's estimated that there'll be a billion knowledge workers in the world.
And my mission is to get
our platform so easily accessible to those billion knowledge workers, it's as easy as using LinkedIn.
And we can scale up now everyone to be an innovator because I truly do everyone, but I truly do believe everyone innovates and that our tool could just be a great innovation
tool for the billion knowledge workers.
I think it'll be like akin to what going out and getting your PMP certification back in the day when project management professionals became.
Innovation management professionals becoming a really exciting career path and they're going to need a tool and they're going to need an assist because this is a very intensive
human driven team sport and it would be helpful to give them as much help as possible to be able to build scale and save time.
No, I really appreciate that.
That's super helpful on it.
I think those analogies really align well with what you're seeing in the industry and makes a lot of sense for trying to kind of bring all these different topics together and
really not just streamlined then, but just make everyone work more efficiently on it.
So, Kim, I want to say thank you.
This was super fascinating.
I really enjoyed this conversation and we'll have to have you on again soon, but just for those listening, I know we'll have some links in the show notes for today's episode, but
What are other ways people can either engage with you or learn more about innovation works or innovation force and the work that your team's doing?
Yeah, no, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
That would be great.
You can learn more about InnovationForce at innovationforce.io.
And as Chase was mentioning, you can click down on our drop down that says innovate with us.
And we're starting to catalog the challenges that we're seeing from transmission to distribution to behind the meter to mobility.
All of those.
We're building unique web pages around so that you can start to get a sense for like, what are the challenges that are really in the platform before I sign up?
encourage everyone to sign up.
So if you go to innovationforce.io, click the sign up button, you can create a free test pilot account for free.
But feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, we'll be happy to upgrade you to a full fledged captain or solver account and give it a shot for 30 days to see if you know if
this helps you.
And that would give you access to Innovation Works AI so that you can run your own grid mod plans and see the challenges and find your unique matches around solutions.
Well, great.
Thank you so much, Kim.
Good, thanks, Chase.
That's a wrap on this episode of Grid Connections.
A big thank you to Kim Getgen for joining us and sharing how InnovationForce is empowering utilities to scale innovation from the inside out.
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