Mobility scenarios for new business development
Leading energy company
The energy industry is facing several major shaping forces, affecting the core of many businesses: shifts in customer preferences, investments in environmentally friendly energy sources, global agenda for decreasing carbon emissions, and innovations such as Power-to-x-technologies. Energy companies are seeking new sources of revenue growth; meanwhile, the core business is slowly being disrupted.
Our client was already active in the electric mobility industry. They wanted to understand the range of alternative directions that the industry might take in the future, and to utilise such foresight to identify new business opportunities alongside electric mobility.
Success criteria
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Understand plausible future directions of the mobility industry in a holistic way,
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Expose blind spots in current thinking and doing,
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Identify new business opportunities.
We built scenarios for the future of mobility by analysing the shaping forces and drivers affecting the industry.
The analysis included, e.g., smart money investments, new technologies, start-ups and innovations in the end-to-end mobility value chain, competitive landscape, and shifts in end-customer needs and preferences for mobility.
Based on the analysis, we identified 10 critical uncertainties affecting the future of mobility, all having 3-4 alternative development paths. With the help of mathematical models, we came up with more than 700 000 scenario combinations, from which we prioritised the four most plausible, yet different scenarios.
With crucial stakeholders, subject matter experts and management, we evaluated the consistencies of different scenarios and identified one scenario that reflected the company’s current view on the most plausible future of the mobility market. Three other scenarios helped the customer prepare for more significant shifts in the markets, all describing plausible future conditions.
We analysed the impact of each scenario on strategic decision-making: from investments to partnerships, new business opportunities and threats. We identified which actions our client should take to mitigate the potential negative business impacts and to strengthen the company’s position in different scenarios.
The value of the outcomes was two-folded. First, identifying alternative futures helped to create foresight that enables to capture emerging opportunities at early stage.
In addition, mapping current and new initiatives against multiple futures help to identify the ones that have the highest future potential to success, and brings clear competitive advantage in the race for spotting the novel opportunities in heated mobility markets.
Second, scenarios enable constant monitoring of changes in the operating conditions. Our approach helped to broaden our clients view to uncertainty factors they didn’t see before and thus increases the capability to react quickly in case of sudden changes.
