Energy, a Brazilian solar energy company, reached out to my partner Alexandre Andrade and me, so we could help them find ways to innovate their service in a fairly new market, a big challenge.

 

We began an innovation consulting process that took months, using the Design Thinking approach to discover things that even they didn’t know, and develop a solution that could bring some incremental innovation to their business.

 

We put everyone from their team on board the process and brought help from professionals from different areas to increase the diversity of thoughts and experiences. Our main work was to facilitate the innovation process using some of the DT Tools and integrate the participants in the same purpose.

 

After months of ideation, we reached a solution: SunHub, a project of distributed solar energy that would create solar farms and distribute its energy to users, who would keep up with the energy they received through the app.

 

SunHub became a new and separated company from BRS, with almost all of the people who were participating becoming its founding partners. We prototyped a MVP, gathered the first users, found the location, and started building the first solar farm, but during this process, the Brazilian government made several changes in the renewable energy laws and some of them made it almost impossible to continue the project.