Playing the ace: how radical collaboration beats secrecy in the connected industrial economy

The top priority for Rizky Rachmadi at Wilo Indonesia, one of the world’s leading pump manufacturers, is helping keep mines running and miners safe. Beneath the earth’s surface, sudden surges of groundwater can halt operations and cause significant damage. As flooding events become more frequent thanks to extreme weather and climate change, Rizky and his colleagues needed to design a new kind of dewatering system for a facility whose remote location made it difficult to inspect and repair equipment frequently. Rizky and his team put their heads together with colleagues from technical agency Arsindo, energy management and automation company Schneider Electric and industrial software leader AVEVA. Together, they developed a cloud-based solution that enables the mine’s engineering team to share information live, so they can locate pumps, track their condition and monitor performance from afar, allowing for timely interventions and maintenance, without frequent on-site inspections.

The new integrated water management and drainage system activates immediately during a flood. Besides preventing waterlogging, energy consumption fell by 20%, downtime reduced by a quarter, and labour costs were cut by 40%, Wilo’s evaluation shows. Thanks to radical collaboration, the mine is now safer. It’s more efficient and operates more sustainably.

Innovation task forces

Like Wilo and its partners, we are now seeing businesses working together across the industrial world to develop new products and processes.

These innovation task forces come together from different companies, and often even from different countries. They brainstorm across digital boardroom tables using new kinds of radical collaboration models to jointly address industry problems that each can’t tackle alone.

A great example is how pharmaceutical competitors formed digital innovation labs during the pandemic to accelerate vaccine development and save lives. We now face equally challenging issues, from climate change and the energy transition to ongoing supply chain disruptions and evolving workforce dynamics.

The complexity of these challenges and the scale of business uncertainty in the fourth industrial revolution, characterised by rapid technological changes and shifting market dynamics, have moved the goalposts of success. Developing new products, for example, now requires levels of investment and expertise only possible for organisations with deep pockets and seemingly infinite resources. Traditional R&D approaches are often insufficient in this new landscape, as solutions now demand cross-industry knowledge and resources that even well-established organisations struggle to provide alone.

Connected industrial intelligence

“Intelligence and insights are the engine driving deeper collaboration, bringing together the best of operational and organisational data with artificial intelligence analytics to create end-to-end insights that span the business lifecycle,” says Caspar Herzberg, Chief Executive Officer, AVEVA. “This is very much the core of open-source data philosophies, but the exponential power comes when you connect it to the cloud. That’s when you can transform competition into collaboration, by empowering teams with trusted insights in real time.”

This new teamwork is accelerating across our connected, digital-first world. We’ve all heard of co-opetition, where competitors partner for mutual benefit while competing in other areas. Now, success in sectors such as renewable energy hinges almost entirely on partnerships. Due to the variable nature of green power sources, every business along the value chain needs real-time intelligence on production, demand, equipment and weather.

Sharing this information, along with accumulated knowledge and best practices, turns complex value chains into flexible, interconnected intelligence networks. This collaborative approach not only sparks new opportunities and greater sustainability but also allows partners to leapfrog common challenges, creating mutually beneficial solutions for people, planet and profit.

Real-time digital communities

For Californian energy consultant ZGlobal and its solar power partner, the solution lay in creating a digital community to share real-time information about electricity ownership as it travels along the power value chain, from producer to scheduler to purchaser. Each party in this digital business ecosystem can access information they need. The community has saved thousands of dollars on power purchases, eliminated time-consuming administration and reduced time to profit to grow faster.

In this case, a systems thinking approach helped teams across partners and silos help optimise all the interconnected factors to drive resilience and sustainability.

Unlocking competitive advantage

As Wilo and ZGlobal demonstrate, innovation increasingly depends on industrial intelligence. This approach now only enhances organisational value but also enables unprecedented resource pooling and expertise sharing among partners and even competitors. This potential for network-wide gains shows why most senior executives feel investing in intelligence and insights is a top priority for the next 12 months, according to the AVEVA Industrial Intelligence Index 2024 survey. A third of them will be looking specifically expect it to enhance teamwork across the employees, suppliers, partners and customers.

As these leaders understand, staying competitive demands radical collaboration in a rapidly evolving business environment.

“Industrial intelligence offers us the tools and insights necessary to navigate the digital-first world, enabling us to work together more effectively and efficiently,” says Barbara Frei, Executive Vice President, Industrial Automation at Schneider Electric. “By embracing these new methods, we not only position ourselves to overcome current challenges but also to seize the opportunities that lie ahead.”

In the connected industrial economy, the future belongs to those who dare to share. By breaking down data silos and forging new paths to innovation across value chains, industry leaders are reshaping the definition of success. As some companies are discovering, in the new game of radical collaboration, playing your ace means sharing your data with customers, partners and even sometimes competitors.