In a landscape of rapidly shifting customer demands and intensifying competition, companies must swiftly harness breakthrough technologies and adapt to disruptive trends — but that’s no easy feat. Thriving in this environment demands the right strategy and the right tools to transform challenges into opportunities.
In this webcast, Gary Walia, Director, Grid of the Future, and Senior Leader, R&D Innovation Business at Southwire and Jan Fischer, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of innosabi GmbH, share how their companies are collaborating to ensure Southwire continually reinvents itself to stay at the forefront of its rapidly evolving industry.
The slides used in this webcast are available for download below.
Here are five highlights from the discussion:
1. Innovation Must Be Both Structured and Scalable
Southwire’s innovation hub, Spark, has an important role in driving strategic product commercialization. The hub focuses on redefining power delivery, curated methodologies, and strategic partnerships to advance disruptive technologies. “The innovation roadmap for Southwire… walks us through that journey…to being very successful, all the way from innovation to product commercialization and implementation,” says Walia.
2. Innovation Belongs to Everyone
innosabi emphasizes that innovation shouldn’t be siloed. Employees across functions should collaborate regardless of title, location, or hierarchy. “When it comes to technologies like ours, it’s our job to make sure that you can access the best people inside the organization that have the highest passion for a certain product, for a certain service idea, and the people with the right knowledge… no matter where they come from, to make sure that innovation is happening,” says Fischer.
3. The Electrical Grid Is Undergoing a Paradigm Shift
Southwire is preparing for a bi-directional, digitized grid powered by renewables, AI, and localized microgrids to meet growing demands and climate resilience. According to Walia, “The grid today is a grid that was built by our grandfathers… We are seeing a lot of revolution happening on the grid…. We’ve mapped out several technologies that are continuing to disrupt and expose breakthrough opportunities.”
4. Disruption Requires Ecosystem Thinking
Southwire’s innovation model is rooted in partnerships across startups, academia, national labs, and customers to develop and deploy scalable solutions. “We couldn’t make this a success alone… this is something we do very holistically with the ecosystem and the management that we have is very involved in those initiatives, from technology partnerships to research projects to proof of concepts and industry engagements,” says Walia.
5. Tools Like innosabi Enable Visibility and Speed
Southwire uses innosabi to centralize tech scouting, track patents, benchmark startups, and align innovation efforts across internal and external stakeholders. According to Walia, “…We’ve been able to centralize our practices and customize and tailor them to the needs that we have…”
Host Bios
Gary Walia, Director, Grid of the Future | Senior Leader – R&D Innovation Business, Southwire
Gary Walia is a seasoned, results-driven leader with well-rounded expertise in the power and energy industry, boasting an extensive track record encompassing T&D utility, global operations, energy management, customer success delivery, electrical manufacturing, regulatory compliance, data center integration, renewable energy systems, sustainability, as well as commercial & industrial market segments. He is currently the Director for Grid of the Future segment at Southwire’s R&D organization with nearly 20 years of thought leadership experience through his previous positions at Schneider Electric and Eaton. Gary has completed an executive program in Global Strategy and Organizational Leadership from INSEAD University in France and holds a degree in Electronic & Electrical Engineering with a specialization in Power Engineering from California State University. He is also an active volunteer at Southwire, as well as for the Big Brother organization for the last 20 years, and Habitat for Humanity for more than half a decade.
Jan Fischer, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, innosabi GmbH
Jan Fischer is Co-Founder & Co-CEO of innosabi GmbH, which is part of the Questel group since 2021. After studying mechanical engineering and management at the Technical University of Munich, Jan was largely responsible for developing new methods and approaches in innovation management on which innosabi software is based. As an expert in digital transformation and agile innovation processes, Jan deals in particular with the question of how companies can achieve more speed and resilience for developing new products, services, and business models across all industries. He regularly shares this knowledge at conferences and has reached an audience of more than 25,000 in recent years. Jan is also managing director of four companies in the Questel family.
Featured photo by Zongnan Bao on Unsplash
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