“The Mission": An Initiative for Generating Innovative Ideas

"The Mission," an initiative by Deutsche Bank, Bain & Company, PreZero and Handelsblatt for shaping a sustainable future, is now at stage 6 with the motto "Energy: be empowered." The Mission is bringing young talents and businesses in different industries together to work on three-month projects developing sustainable solutions for 12 areas of interest. Uniper is supporting the initiative by acting as a premium partner for the sixth area—Energy—an industry that is under pressure to undergo transformation.

The aim is to think up new ideas for implementing the energy transition in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the amount of energy being generated from renewable sources like wind, solar power, water and biomass. Solutions to issues such as decarbonization, renewables, new storage technologies and security of supply necessitate agile working, which is why Uniper is using this sixth sub-mission about the energy transition as an additional building block in its co-ideation program: Between June 7 and August 31, 2021, five teams of graduates and young professionals are coming up with innovative ideas that will shape and facilitate change in the energy industry.

The innovation and venture platform Futury is taking care of recruiting and casting young talents, then putting the final teams together and working closely with them. Uniper aims to draw on its own transnational skills and expertise from the fields of engineering, trading, operations and process excellence and combine them with the young talents' out-of-the-box mindset and innovative spirit. This will enable completely new business models to be developed on the back of exchanging ideas, being honest with each other, inspiring one another, and subjecting proposals to multiple rounds of feedback and revision.

Since the teams presented their ideas in June; Uniper experts have been on hand to offer advice on and assistance with the next steps by expressing constructive criticism and suggesting issues for consideration. "What emerged was a creative process—a kind of ideation cycle—where we generated ideas and hypotheses, discarded them, then reworked them. The business models being presented at the final pitch on August 31st are very different than the ones we focused on in the beginning. This is due to the highly complex nature of each individual piece of the energy industry puzzle," says Tobias Georgi, Innovation Manager who focuses on idea-generation processes at Uniper.

"We need to keep our 'ideation boiler' going at all times. After we introduced the co-ideation approach last year—which has seen us collaborate more closely with partners such as public utility companies, start-ups, universities, customers and suppliers during the idea-generation process—'The Mission' is going one decisive step further," explains Tobias Georgi. 'The Mission' has led to the creation of an ecosystem comprising not only different partners in the industry but partners from different sectors too.

This interdisciplinary approach is creating new ways of looking at things and a dynamic for the teams of young talents to work on transformational issues together with experts in. Uniper's objectives are to reflect on how it has developed as a company, network with young professionals and colleagues working in the industry, and gather new ideas that have been created within this ecosystem. "If any of the concepts that are developed fit in with our focus and our strategy—and we have the best possible partners at our disposal to implement them—we'll be happy to see them through to market launch even after 'The Mission' has finished," says Renate Krammer, Head of Innovation at Uniper

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