CHAPTER TWENTY DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE MAKING:LESSONS FROM A LARGE ENERGY COMPANY
Luigi M. De Luca, Andrea Rossi, Zahir Sumar, and Gabriele Troilo
20.1 Summary
The objective of this chapter is to describe the journey of Centrica Plc from a traditional energy retailer toward a digital service company. The shift follows the threat of commoditization of the core business but is also driven by the huge innovation opportunities afforded by digital technologies, big data and analytics that are part of the assets available to the organization. The journey is characterized by both successes and failures. Far from having been fully realized, this transformation is still in the making. The insights reported in this chapter are backed by a longitudinal case study of the company’s digital transformation, which includes empirical evidence from participant observation, project reviews, and other sources of primary data from the company.1 The overarching question discussed in this chapter is: How does a large incumbent organization transform itself through a digital transformation? In describing the key phases of Centrica’s digital transformation journey over the last ten years, we focus on a specific innovation team (the Accelerator Hub) and describe how they have successfully promoted new product/service development approaches such as Design Thinking, agile, and other techniques to ...
Get The PDMA Handbook of Innovation and New Product Development, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
