Accenture boss Tinkler urges utilities to ‘reinvent business as usual’

Accenture’s global utilities lead issues call to ‘compress innovation cycles into months’

Accenture’s global utilities lead Scott Tinkler drew inspiration from Portugal’s legendary maritime history when he opened the company’s annual utilities and energy conference in Lisbon.

Standing on a stage that looked out to the seas navigated by Portuguese explorers, Tinkler said that in their day they “led the world” and had steered their way through continual threats including pirates, storms and conflicts.

“They persevered,” said Tinkler, who added that the utilities sector was also “navigating our own turbulent waters… and we too will persevere”.

Accenture’s International Utilities and Energy Conference in Lisbon comes as the energy sector is at the halfway point between the signing of the Paris Agreement and 2030 – the first major deadline of the pact.

And Tinkler – who knows something about navigation and momentum having once been an avionics engineer with Sikorsky Aircraft – was keen to stress that the sector should not focus just on the destination of the energy transition.

“The net-zero project has no beginning or end: the journey is as important as the goal. It’s the course that we set that will define our success. With net zero there is no turning back to shore.”

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Tinkler said the age of discovery’ “was the moonshot of its time, pushing human ingenuity to its limits”.

But he added that “it took decades”, and the urgency of the energy transition meant that “time is a luxury that we don’t have” and urged greater collaboration and innovation to “navigate these choppy waters.”

He called on the industry players in the room – which ranged from power generators to grid operators to digital innovators – to “sustain the momentum” by “accessing the best talent in and outside of the industry… compress innovation cycles into months and maximise the potential of AI”.

In short, he said, “we must reinvent business as usual”.

Later in the day I sat down with Tinkler – who’s been with Accenture for 27 years – for an exclusive interview, and I picked up on his call to compress innovation.

He explained that before you can compress innovation – or indeed even begin to innovate – a company must understand why innovation is the oxygen of business.

Innovative thinking for utilities

“Innovative thinking is powering the energy transition, he said. “The first thing [a company needs] is to recognise that without innovation, you’re going to be in stasis. It’s the understanding that without it, you’re going to be left behind.”

He said that historically, a lot of energy and utility leaders had “dabbled with innovation: they’ve done it for innovation’s sake, and it hasn’t yielded the benefits”.

“They’ve spent a lot of money creating innovation studios or innovation capabilities… and it would often go nowhere. They were creating hundreds of pilots, but they would never scale them or activate them.”

Now he says lessons have been learned – or at least are in the process of being learned.

“We’ve been trying to work with them – and they’ve been doing it on their own too – on doing a better job of taking those learnings, identifying which ones present opportunity and have the business case to create value – whether value is to customers, shareholders, employees or the community  – and then scale it as quickly as possible and not look back.”

Originally published on powerengineeringint.com