The Energy Innovation Centre

Full creation of all digital assets and processes to enable business growth

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The Brief

The Energy Innovation Centre, or EIC, was established in 2008 as a global not-for profit organisation with a vision to reach far beyond the creation of new or improved utility systems. They are passionate about driving social progress, improving the quality of people’s lives and securing a safe, affordable and sustainable future for our children. Working in partnership with ten gas, electricity and water utilities and the Energy Systems Catapult (ESC), the EIC bridge the gap between industry and innovators.

The brief to SOTech was to create the entire platform to drive the business strategy both from a customer facing presence to the back end admin areas for both innovators and industries.

The solution

After multiple discover and strategy sessions with the key stakeholders at The EIC, we established a full architecture of the two key user persona’s

The Innovator
The Industry
The EIC Admin

Each of these user persona’s required a different user journey and feature set while all the data had to sync across the different login’s.

We settled on using a Laravel Back-End to build the core database and platform structure alongside a Vue front end to allow for quick and flexible development of new pages and features.

Single Admin Area catering to each user profile

Allowing innovators to upload their innovations and track progress, allowing Industries to review innovations and leave feedback AND allowing EIC admins to manage both innovator and Industry profiles and accounts.

Automatic matching of innovators and industries

Using smart tagging we are able to automatically match up new innovation submissions with their ideal industry.

Lead generation through public facing landing pages

This allows The EIC to promote potential projects and Innovation requests to drive traffic from SME’s.

Automatic vetting system for innovation submissions

Bespoke criteria set-up allows non-suitable submissions to be segmented for approval while allowing ideal submissions straight into the network.

Admin tracking of user behaviour and interactions

Allowing The EIC to understand relationships and interest of their users.

Bespoke project management tool for use by both Innovators and Industries

Ultimately one of the key features of the platform to make it easy for both parties to communicate and manage the projects they agree to work on together.

The Results

In essence the biggest result is the fact the entire EIC business is now ran via this portal, a true Digital Transformation of their business.

For the first time ever EIC have brought together Energy companies, Water Companies and other Industries to collaborate on projects for environmental benefits.

Increased efficiency in number of projects being managed and in turn, more SME innovations being picked up for investment.