Stroom
In a small, interdisciplinary team we developed business and design strategies for the future of decentralised energy.
Design Disciplines
Service, Interaction, Business
Client
EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG
Rest of the Team
Simon Baumgärtner
Jonas Knödler
Stroom is the first energy provider to actively engage customers in the energy transition. Instead of buying electricity per kilowatt hour, consumers rent shares in Stroom’s wind and solar plants. They receive the green electricity from their shares free of charge.
How Can We Accelerate the Energy Transition?
This question fueled our master's thesis. To answer it, we needed to understand the German energy market. We analyzed political, technological trends to forecast the markets possible futures. Then we build strategic guidelines and designed a business for today with multiple touchpoints, which then needed to be designed.
Understand what matters
To manage the workload we divided the topic in different sections. We needed to understand the political dimension of the energy transition in Germany and the EU, the technological dimension and its most promising developments and we had to get an overview of how the market works and who its players are.
To fully appreciate the human point of view, we identified representatives of each involved group and conducted hour long interviews with each.
Future Scenarios
We extrapolated our research to build a better vision of the future. Based on a specific timeline, we concluded seven scenarios. To evaluate their likeliness we identified its relevant factors and discussed them with experts.
Strategic Guideline
We identified core processes that needed to happen and thought about which of these we could accelerate. Based on that we coined opportunity areas and set our mission:
We enable participation in the energy transition.
Concept Development
By relying on classic brainstorming methods, we developed concepts and value propositions for todays user.
By the time we reached 30 or more concepts we needed to think of a quick evaluation method. Follow the link to see my story on our Evaluation Matrix.
Business Design
Once we found a fitting value proposition for our target group, we build a business around it. I further did a financial calculation to define hypothetical funding need and revenue.
Double Diamond
Having set the business model, we iterated on its touchpoints and followed the classic “Double Diamond” process.
We build a communication strategy and a brand as well as we prototyped website and app to manage energy contracts and gain insights to ones consumption. All that we iteratively challenged with qualitative user interviews.
