Continental Energy
- Mar 21
- 3 min read
Problem owners: Continenal Boilers.
Process owners: Ricardo Mejia, Fabio Ariza, and Alejandro Chitiva (Innventivo, specialized design services).
Completion Date: End 2015, The Netherlands
I made this vision concept as part of the development of DIVE. It is a design-led futures technique that assists designers in making and sharing vision concepts for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Its development began with an inquiry into concept cars in the automotive industry and concept products and services in other industries. We then combined the insights derived from these design practices with elements of the existing techniques of critical design and design fiction into the creation of DIVE’s preliminary first version, which was then applied and evaluated in two iterations with SMEs, resulting in DIVE’s alpha version. This vision concept acts as a probe that explores a new territory, the speculative future of Continenal Boilers.
Continental Boilers is a small-sized family enterprise focused on the manufacture and delivery of steam boilers, hot water systems, and heat exchangers. Through the Strategic PES (see more details of this tool here), we found that “Continental Boilers is a salmon with small fins –products with minimal turnover, long life-cycle, and inexpensive maintenance– and it is swimming against the current.” To survive in the river, the salmon either needs to grow the muscles of its fins or find an alternative way to swim, such as by introducing new products or another business model.
Purposes
The purposes of this exploration are related to innovation, as a way to cope with the complexity of the future, and communication, as a way to share and discuss the strategic direction of Continental Boilers with several stakeholders involved in innovation. A strategic direction that:
inspires ideas about the future of the business
choose the direction of the company
understand how to implement new technology
Process
After a STEEP analysis, in which several context factors were organized in a 2X2 matrix, a vision emerged: “Continental Boilers wishes to provide steam and hot water to factories within industrial parks through a service that follows the client’s needs, being in the forefront of the environmental regulations.”
Activities: DIVE: setting a domain, defining a vision, creating the vision concept, and making the prototype. Moreover, we have used the prototype to discuss the future with the company representatives.
Length: seventy hours in the whole project, including three days making the video.
Budget: We spent less than 200 Euros making the prototype.
Results
After several iterations, which included sketches of new services and products, we created the vision concept: Continental Energy 2030, a service that includes the selling of steam and hot water and the renting of portable boilers and heat exchangers. To support this service, the company will offer the client a mobile app to control its consumption and receive technical support. Following this activity, we produced a simple video of a fictional client, an industrial laundry, in need of steam and hot water for its washers and dryers that help reduce its energy consumption. Through the video, we introduce the main features of the 2030 service.
We arranged a workshop with three company representatives: the general manager and the directors of innovation, and marketing and sales. We used the video to stimulate a conversation about the Continental Boilers’ desirable futures. Based on this conversation, we formulated a series of recommendations setting a track between the present and the future, explored by the vision concept.
T
he general manager summarized the DIVE experience as the “first moment, in a long time, that [they] had the chance to look at the future.” According to him, they are “so involved in the daily life –[they] have been doing the same for 48 years– that it’s difficult to think ahead”.
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