Flexible Innovation with Celia Cheng From SunPower
The Right Product Out Faster
Introduction:
This short video was recorded in 2019, just as SunPower released the Maxeon solar energy platform, a project that I'm proud to have influenced. The Project Managers at SunPower's PMO attended the first-ever Rapid Learning Cycles workshop in Portland, Oregon in November, 2015.
This video describes how SunPower used Rapid Learning Cycles to improve the quality and timing of decisions for this platform, and how that resulted in a better product.
It's an example of how Agile thinking can apply to climate tech development to deliver a better product to the market in less time.
Full Transcript:
Celia Cheng
"We do a lot of different types of development. We do solar cell innovation and we make them into solar panels. We build solar systems and then we integrate them into a full solution. So there's a lot of different types of development that we do. And so we've always been thinking about how do we innovate better with how we do our development process with all these different kinds of development that we do."
Katherine Radeka
"They innovate around everything from the basic science of solar technology to new ways of delivering that technology for homeowners and commercial users who want to convert themselves to green energy."
Celia Cheng
"One of the technologies that we've developed is our next gen technologies cell, which is going from a five inch cell to a six inch larger format. But this is not the product. The product is actually all the way to the residential, a complete solution. There's a lot to that. You can imagine there's a lot of decisions along the way. There are long lead time items that you have, like, equipment decisions that have to get made very early on.
So one of the things that Rapid Learning Cycles helped in a very complex program like this, is that in the beginning, there are so many decisions and so many unknowns that everybody just wants to get them all answered, but really what you need to be able to say is some decisions you don't need to figure out until later, what decision do I need to understand at the point that I may need to make that equipment purchase? And by having that decision deferred, you actually have a lot of optionality while the market continues to evolve."
Katherine Radeka
"Because they have such a range of things, a one-size-fits-all approach, isn't going to work for them. So SunPower is a great example of how you use the principles of High Velocity Innovation, but then you use the right tools for the job when it comes to how you actually run an innovation program."
Celia Cheng
"As we continue to evolve our innovations and our solution space, we've actually invested a lot in our digital. And so one of the exciting products that we're releasing soon is our SunPower design studio. And what it does is it allows the homeowner to actually go ahead and input their address and see a design on their home within seconds. This is in partnership with Google and it's an incredible new technology that does not exist anywhere else. I think we were expecting to get product out faster. It's actually done a lot more than that. I think it has gotten the right product out faster because, with every decision there's discussion and thought — it's a very thoughtful decision that happened."