Talking about ideas…
Ideas:it has to be done! That is our claim and we love it! Let us tell you a little bit about a project that excites us because we’re really doing it.
We have our internal idea management tool and it is cool to see all these ideas of employees. But of course you have to motivate people to share their ideas over and over again. One way to keep motivation high is to have competitions and last year we had such a competition where we askes every one of the 1.700 employees of Energie Steiermark to share their ideas concerning sustainability with us. What are ideas to make us as a corporate more sustainably but also ideas for each and everyone’s individual and private life? The result was awesome and a handful of ideas are already reality now.
One idea that still excites us is upcycling of old and worn out polyphaser meters. The idea came from our colleague Andreas Gößler who was one of the 10 finalists and got to present it in front of the CEO’s. We LOVE this idea and sustainability is of huge importance for our innovation team. Taking something that is used and mostly waste for us and making something new out of it is just a wonderful thought. AND we wanted to have something beautiful. So we decided to do it ourselves.
We officially started the project in december 19 with a kick-off meeting with the idea’s mastermind Andreas Gößler and Norbert Linninger of the Technik GmbH to get hands on the polyphaser meters. At first we thought about doing a design competition with artists and universities but in the end we found one artist that was willing to work on several prototypes for us. We asked her to work on give-aways and decoration elements for our 1st Innovationday on April 2nd. What a good move! Her work is fantastic!
We’re having ‘Live-energy-Meters’ now, decoration elements, a necklace and many other things.
But of course someone has to actually make her ideas work and this means screwing, hammering and crafting. Of course we’re doing it but we got some help of the apprentices of Energie Steiermark. It is so much easier with the help of experts 😉
Next step now is to geht everything ready for our Innovation Day an April 2nd. But hey, ideas:it has to be done!
Barbara Hütter und Karin Pirolt
