White Papers and Thought Pieces

TOMORROW: Global Innovation Insight 2011

The only businesses who can greet the future confidently are those who innovate. And collaborate. Tomorrow belongs to companies who tap into these two qualities. To businesses that ensure that its people have the right skills and opportunities to build a vibrant, competitive environment. And they need to have an insight into the trends that will lead the future of business. That’s why we are back with a refreshed view of Tomorrow. Read.

INSEAD Report: Are you Innovation ready?

The global economy has become more inter-connected. It is no longer possible to craft a solution for one country or region in isolation while neglecting global inter-connectedness. Sustainability has also come to the fore. What works as a short-term fix will no longer be a good long-term solution. Global challenges such as climate change, energy shortages, food scarcity and health pandemics overshadow and influence our thinking about long-term solutions. Leaders from the public and private sectors are being challenged to rethink the interlinked relationships between business, government and society at large. All in all, we are operating in a context where fresh thinking and innovation have become paramount.

INSEAD and Logica surveyed two hundred CxO level business leaders from blue-chip organisations, from public and private sectors across Europe, about their views on innovation. Based on the findings, INSEAD developed an Innovation Readiness Model (IRM), as a way to rank organisations' ability to innovate successfully. The ‘readiness’ ranking is the measurement of an organisation’s ability to put into practise leading-edge thinking on innovation. The IRM showed that despite leaders prioritising innovation at board level, organisations scored on average a disappointing two out of four on the IRM. Read

Logica CiMS - our vision for electric vehicles

In this paper we’ll tell you our vision for electric vehicles - how they will further sustainability and when, how, where and why charge point facilitation fits perfectly into the whole idea. So how did we get here? It was late 2008. We - Logica, the Netherlands’ energy grid operator Enexis, and charge point supplier Alfen started a research and development (R&D) project. The idea was to develop an end-to-end solution for electric vehicle charge point infrastructure. It was a collaborative effort.

At Logica, our focus was the information exchange between charge points and the infrastructure management system. We paid specific attention to privacy and security — identification and authorisation, remote management and transaction processing. This R&D project resulted in a pilot. The pilot was a success. It got us a request and agreement from the foundation E-laad.nl – an initiative of cooperating network operators in the Netherlands to facilitate electric vehicle charging. We were asked to develop the information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure for the roll-out of a national grid of 10,000 charge points in the Netherlands. The infrastructure management system was named the Charge point interactive Management System (CiMS).

CiMS isn’t just limited to specific clients. It’s available to anyone anywhere.Read

SIRA – Turning Sustainability into Reality

The route to sustainability is a complex one. And it starts with monitoring and reporting to stakeholders what your organisation is doing now. To do this properly you need to go into every aspect of your operations at a very fine level of detail – a finer level than typical spreadsheeting can achieve. And engage with stakeholders in a more creative way, to help integrate the concept of sustainability throughout your organisation.

And so at Logica, we decided to invest in and develop a specific tool for reporting on sustainability: the Sustainability Indicator Reporting Application (SIRA), modeled on the Global Reporting Initiative. SIRA has undoubtedly smoothed our way towards balancing the triple bottom line: people-profit-planet. Its graphical interface makes it easy to pinpoint areas of success and highlight where we need to make improvements. While it’s supporting software is flexible and scalable enough to deal with new areas of enquiry and ever-growing volumes of data. Read

Our contribution to the World Economic Forum (WEF)

This Thought Piece forms Chapter10 of Part 1 (chapter 1.10) of the prestigious Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010. The report is published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in cooperation with INSEAD. This piece explores the impact of technology, innovative business models, and policymaking on environmental sustainability. And how (ICT) driven companies can leverage their abilities in smart information management and create new services that positively influence people to combat climate challenge. Read