How we made a virtual accelerator happen during the pandemic with Eesti Energia 

When you have been preparing for an intense experimentation bootcamp and circumstances change (namely the COVID-19 isolation) you have no other choice but to use it as an impetus for stimulating new ideas. Together with Eesti Energia - a public limited energy company HQ’d in Tallinn - we jumped at an opportunity to pivot to a fully online format keeping the same values in place.

The goals were straightforward: give the five pre-selected teams the guidance and time to run more and better experiments validating their ideas with customers and building clickable prototypes in 2 weeks.  

/Type: Virtual Experimentation Bootcamp 

/Number of people: 40 (+satellite members)

/Number of teams: 5 (averaging 8 persons per team)

/Number of full-time facilitators/mentors: 2

/External experts doing daily webinars: 6

/Duration: 10 days

/Prep work time: 1.5 months

Eesti Energia ran an open Enefit Idea HUB contest searching for ideas that would transform the energy sector into a smart system that maximizes comfort, personalization and opportunity for the end user. Five winning ideas then followed to the next stage of development - the experimentation bootcamp. That is where Elevate came in.

To make sure that the participants start-off on the right foot, we facilitated individual 1,5 hour team workshops to help them gain a better understanding of the problems and set goals for the bootcamp. Doing the analysis before the bootcamp is key in ensuring that no valuable time is wasted and everyone is on the same page at day 1 of the accelerator.

Adapting to a new format was a challenge for all involved. The activities that we had proved worked so well offline, had to be adapted to the online space.

First, we gave the teams digital tools that would allow them to keep track of their progress and communicate better. Secondly, we invited speakers to online webinars (open to everyone in the organization) where participants were encouraged to ask their questions in a chat format. Some activities called for some imagination, like the Agile retrospectives (commonly known as retros) where the team reflects on what happened and identify actions for improvement going forward, were held on virtual walls instead of physical ones, Google Sheet replacing whiteboard and post-its, but offering the same benefits.

For ten days teams took initiative in running as many experiments as they could to find out customer needs based on their challenge. In two weeks, they received nearly 3000 responses to questionnaires and conducted over 110 customer interviews fulfilling the goal of involving customers as early as possible to validate solutions quickly and flexibly.

Dedicated mentors guided them along the way through daily sessions.

The teams were tackling challenges ranging from using sensors to get a better overview of problems in data grids, developing portable smart chargers and other charging solutions, and rethinking household energy consumption or electrical vehicle charging.

When it comes to accelerating corporate teams we in Elevate continue tapping into our stellar expert pool from some of the leading Estonian startups. These were the people sharing their practical experience in webinar format with Eesti Energia teams:

"User centered design and agile execution" / Jonathan Galea, Head of Product and Design at Lingvist

"What It Takes To Own The Product" / Henn Ruukel, co-founder at Fleep, CPO at Veriff; ex-Skype

"Data-Driven Decisions and Experiments With Product" / Elizaveta Lebedeva, Data Scientist at Bolt

"How to Excel Working in Cross-Functional Teams" / Tiit Paananen, VP of Engineering at Veriff, ex-Pipedrive and Skype. Co-founder of Põhjala Brewery

"Building a Bulletproof Product" / Kair Käsper, co-founder of Klaus, ex-Pipedrive

"What your CEO wants to hear (how to do an executive pitch)" / Liis Narusk, founder and ceo of Elevate; ex-SEB Bank

The 10 day bootcamp culminated in a live virtual pitching event open to all Eesti Energia employees. During a 5 minute pitch the five teams shared the demos of clickable prototypes together with business concepts and what their further plans going to market are.

All 5 teams’ progress was graded “exceeded expectations” by the jury compiled of the management board members of Eesti Energia Hando Sutter, Agnes Roos, Jaanus Tiisvend and Margus Vals. All 5 teams got a green light to continue with their projects with the goal to launch to market within 2020.

Based on our feedback survey 75,5% of people who took part in the program replied they found this way of working to be extremely useful for the company and 68,6% respondents said they would participate again if Eesti Energia were to organise a similar accelerator.

"I would say this format is the new normal in how to work and how to launch new business, especially in the remote world. Customer centric development is the only way how to innovate and create value adding services for our clients. " Margus Vals, Member of the Management Board at Eesti Energia

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