The solar industry continues to reach new heights as global awareness spreads of our need for—and the benefits of—clean, renewable energy. The industry’s growth has also sparked the development of innovative business management strategies and tactics.
In the March/April 2017 Issue of Solar Pro magazine, Inovateus’ President/CEO TJ Kanczuzewski contributes some powerful insights into the business practices behind the success of our organization in a feature titled “Scaling and Streamlining Solar Business Growth.” TJ’s article, “Biomimicry and Meeting Rhythms Promote PEACE,” explains how “we’ve embraced biomimicry as a way to rethink processes.” He calls Inovateus “a living organism that is in continuous growth and improvement mode,” and notes how the concept has given birth to ideas such as our meeting rhythms, TREE process and POD structures.
Biomimicry is an exciting emergent discipline that examines how we can emulate nature’s processes and patterns to help solve human problems in a sustainable way. The approach can be applied to product design, research and development, and other business activities. Our company has adopted several such innovative concepts from a pool of diverse sources, including Stanley McChrystal, Verne Harnish, and various speakers who have joined our weekly solar think tank sessions—even dolphins have inspired some of our business procedures!
Here are a few excerpts from TJ’s article.
Business Biomimicry
“One of the things we’ve done is create what we call PODs for each project. These are unified, inclusive cross-disciplinary teams. Our inspiration for PODs came from diverse sources. For one, we applied a feature from the natural world, namely how dolphins and other wild creatures live and work together (hence the name). We also borrowed ideas from retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal’s book Team of Teams and his experience with breaking down operational structure gaps in the military and making groups ‘faster, flatter and more flexible.’ In a sense, the POD is our biomimicry-influenced team of teams.”
While the concept of PODs may seem simple enough, the transformative effect this implementation has had on our team and the way we communicate has been monumental. Leveraging biomimicry can ultimately lead to sustainable, profitable technologies and practices that increase revenues, mitigate risk and reduce costs, much like the next example that TJ illustrates.
Growing Efficiently
“We understood that we had to grow efficiently if we were going to meet our goals and fulfill our vision. We realized that not every solar project was right for our company, so we developed another acronymic and biomimicry process we call TREE, which stands for ‘the renewable energy engine.’ TREE is our mechanism for identifying, vetting and bidding on new projects for our pipeline…. TREE has five stages or branches, starting with an ‘RFP machine’ concept. From the beginning of project evaluation all the way through the project proposal submission process, we use a “go or no-go” filtering method to continually assess the opportunities at every stage.”
As we continue to face business challenges, we realize that nature’s patterns and behaviors can inspire relevant and applicable approaches for our own evolutionary success in business and beyond.
TJ has been busy putting his ideas on paper over the past year, and we’re excited to announce that his book, Building A Brilliant Tomorrow: The Transformation of Inovateus Solar and the Energy Revolution, will soon hit the shelves. We will be sharing more information about the book—including excerpts— so stay tuned!
By Heather Dixon, marketing coordinator, Inovateus Solar
