THE COMPANY

Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) is the only electric utility company in Peninsular Malaysia and the largest power company in South East Asia with more than 33,000 employees and 8.3 million customers across the country.

How South East Asia’s Largest Power Company is Uncovering New Business Models

We ran an intensive 2-month innovation program, concluding with a 3-day innovation workshop with the team leads at Tenaga Nasional Berhad in August last year. Curious to know how they’ve progressed, we recently had an in-depth check-in session with the Senior Manager of Investment Management at Tenaga Nasional, Sabirah Arifin.

Here’s what she had to share:

THE CHALLENGE

Our Subsidiaries have been charged with structuring new growth and creating new revenue streams, often requiring them to expand beyond their core offering.

This is of course, easier said than done.

Their biggest challenge isn’t in identifying new opportunities (product & market) but in bringing those ideas and concepts to market and to further scale them up to become their new core.

The existing tools could definitely help expand the current core business, but we wanted to grow beyond our core competencies and scale up.

I didn’t want consultants to just come in, get paid a lot of money to set everything up and tell you what to do. I wanted our leadership team to feel like they own this, and to do that they had to build it up themselves. Engage // Innovate gave us the tools and knowledge to realize this.

Sabirah Arifin Senior Manager of Investment Management,Tenaga Nasional Berhad

THE SOLUTION

A Tailored 3-Day Strategy Workshop

Engage // Innovate had a library of workshop videos online, allowing us to sample a preview of how they conduct their program. Watching its Strategic Business Innovation program videos had piqued our interest tremendously.

However, we wanted an in-house workshop specially tailored to our company’s challenges to enhance our current innovation strategy.

We reached out to lead facilitator and founder of Engage // Innovate Christian Rangen to customize a strategy and innovation workshop. We wanted case studies and examples that our subsidiaries could relate to in juxtaposition.

It was a very inspiring 3-day workshop, where we got hands-on with the tools, came up with some really good ideas and generally had a really intensive learning session. In my opinion, he definitely delivered.

The participants were energized and driven after the workshop, having learnt to see business models and innovation in a way it has never been done before.

The Right Strategy Toolkit for Successful Business Model Innovation

Besides relevant case studies and industry examples, Christian also shared Engage // Innovate’s portfolio of strategy tools to the team and trained us to use them effectively.

He showed us how these tools have been applied, where they’ve been applied, and what successes came as a result of using them. Each tool served a specific purpose and the entire toolkit tied things up nicely so there’s a deliverable at the end.

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A public innovation and strategy workshop will see participants from different industries and countries, so cases would be generic and we’ll essentially just learn how to use the strategy tools. Engage // Innovate’s in-house workshop gave us a more relevant in-depth dive into these tools, showing us how we could apply them in our own context.

Sabirah ArifinSenior Manager of Investment Management,Tenaga Nasional Berhad

THE RESULTS

New Growth Areas and Business Models

Following the program, we could see that a range of new growth areas and business models are being developed. Even more so, we are seeing these ideas and concepts being included in the subsidiaries’ medium to long-term business plans.

A Shared Vision on Expanding Beyond the Core Business

The strategy tools and knowledge garnered during the workshop has given our leaders a rough blueprint of what they are able to explore and how they can move forward with it.

As an example, we have a newly-established IT-related subsidiary that has been consistently using Engage // Innovate’s strategy tools in its discussions. This has resulted in a better-structured business design and a clearer picture of what they intend to do.

A more driven, excited team

What made the strategy workshop with Christian Rangen great, was that he got the team of Managing Directors fired up and excited about new possibilities. He made us believe that we too, are able to come up with industry-disrupting business models and that groundbreaking ideas could become reality sooner than we conventionally would think.

We’ve never been more inspired and empowered.

Sabirah ArifinSenior Manager of Investment Management,Tenaga Nasional Berhad

THE COMPANY

How South East Asia’s Largest Power Company is Uncovering New Business Models

THE CHALLENGE