From development studies to energy

EET&D – You earned an MPhil in international development. That seems like quite a distance from energy technology.

Getgen – I’m not an engineer. I was interested in earth studies. At the time, there weren’t many formal environmental studies programs, but I had an opportunity to do a visiting year abroad and study with professors at Oxford’s geography department. Later, I applied for an international development studies program and completed the MPhil, which is the US equivalent of a master's degree. I had a very specific focus on West Africa, looking at the history of forests, colonization and deforestation. That was a big spark for me.

EET&D – So, you started with an environmental focus.How did that eventually lead to energy and technology?

Getgen – I always intended to work in energy, but the path wasn’t direct. I found my way into Silicon Valley, where I started in the cybersecurity industry. I even founded a cybersecurity company that was later acquired. That experience opened the door for me to jump into the energy sector.

EET&D – After moving from Silicon Valley into the energy industry, how did your experience working inside so many startups shape the way you saw the challenges of commercialization?

Getgen – I started at the bottom, worked my way up, and really started to understand how the industry functioned. Over the course of 12 to 15 years of working with startups, I began to see a pattern: every growth problem, whether it was sales or marketing, came down to the pilot process. Startups had to prove their technology through pilots, but those programs often stalled. I found myself asking the same question over and over: How do we commercialize this new technology faster with utilities?

The pilot problem

EET&D – When did you start to realize the pilot process itself was the real problem?

Getgen – Every startup I worked with ran into the same issue. They’d have a promising technology, but the only way to get traction was through a pilot program. And those pilots were slow, expensive and often ended without a clear path to monetization.

Startups didn’t want to pilot for free — or forever — but that was the reality. I found myself constantly redesigning pilot strategies for each new company. I had the same experience with every single startup I worked with. I had to start a whole new pilot commercialization strategy. I did that so many times, and I got tired of it because it was getting a little old, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

It was really frustrating me because I thought, “This feels like it needs to be fixed.”

EET&D – Why do you think the utility remains the only viable path, even with so much innovation happening outside of it?

Getgen – You cannot go around the utility to drive modernization in the energy sector. There's one path, and it is through the utility, whether we like it or not.

Recent research from Berkeley Labs shows that the bottleneck is the utility. Billions of dollars have been invested in demonstration projects. For example, EPIC in California has invested over a billion dollars in demonstration projects since it started back in 2014.

But those demonstrations need to then move on to be piloted at a utility if we want to capitalize on that investment. There’s more technology than utilities can handle. They can't run these pilots fast enough, so they become the bottleneck to commercialization.

If utilities can't run the pilots fast enough, those investments risk becoming stranded assets. That’s the glaring problem. And because I’d seen it from both sides — startup and utility — I knew we needed a systemwide solution.

InnovationForce is born

EET&D – You mentioned your frustration over seeing the same roadblocks repeatedly. What made you decide to channel that frustration and build something new around it?

Getgen – That realization set the stage for InnovationForce. The COVID-19 pandemic provided a pause for deep reflection about what I wanted to do with my career.

Before COVID, I had spent a lot of time working for startups in the energy space that had new cutting-edge technologies.

After COVID, I was contracted to run an innovation program at Portland General Electric. They were building a virtual power plant and needed 5G-enabled use cases. We called it the Connected Utility. I mapped out 200 use cases that were going to need to be enabled with 5G. But Portland really needed it because they were building a virtual power plant, and they needed to harness these DERs through a VPP to overcome not only the growing capacity constraints, but at that time, there was a push for decarbonization goals.

Working inside the utility, I saw the same frustrations they had were the same ones identified during my time at the startups. Too many pilots, not enough resources to run the volume and scale of pilots and no clear process to manage them. I brought my pilot process I’d used at startups, and the utility loved it. I was excited to see what worked for the startups trying to complete pilots, which also made sense to the utility — the management challenges were the same.

This is what led me to create InnovationForce, which is a SaaS platform that uses AI to match industry challenges with potential solutions and then streamline pilots into a manageable workflow. Our AI reads regulatory filings, extracts challenges, matches them to vendor solutions and allows the utility and startup to work together in a repeatable pilot workflow. Instead of one-off, slow-moving pilots, companies can track challenges, test solutions and move them toward production in a systematic way. I could have launched InnovationForce by beginning with the startup, but instead, we built it with utilities from the inside out. That’s why I think startups in the utility industry should pay attention to what we are doing. I am saving them time and money by giving them a repeatable pilot process that was proven at the utility first. Similarly, utilities should pay attention because they have a process their peers are using and it’s working for them.

We have shown early results that have cut pilot times in half and reduced decision-making time by 85%. With PGE, they put out their Innovation Impact Report, which showed they greenlit 50% of pilots to move to the production at scale phase, which is unheard of.

Innovation is not just about tools

EET&D – How has the market received your SaaS platform? Can you give an example of how the platform works in practice?

Getgen – InnovationForce has already been put to work in the U.S. and abroad, showing how utilities and partners can use AI to accelerate innovation.

Portland General Electric, which was really our proving ground, is a good example of how the platform works. We mapped out their challenges and used the platform to identify use cases for a virtual power plant. That showed us the scale of the problem and the opportunity to apply AI.

More recently, we’ve partnered with AboitizPower in the Philippines. They wanted to foster a way to standardize innovation across 1,000 employees, who are all contributing ideas. Using our platform, they’ve been able to source, evaluate and prioritize those ideas in a structured way, with clear reporting to leadership.

EET&D – When you’re running a pilot, what needs to happen for all the stakeholders to feel confident and aligned?

Getgen – It’s important to understand that innovation isn’t just about tools; it’s about strategic alignment. Utilities need to see what ideas are emerging, how they connect to strategy and which ones can scale. When people across the organization — and their vendors and regulators — all see the same information, it builds trust. That trust is what allows a pilot to move forward, because everyone believes in the process and can see where it’s going.

Some utilities want us to manage this for them — we call that innovation-as-a-service. That’s how we started with Portland. For two years, we built and prototyped the software with them. Once the SaaS platform launched, Portland stopped using us as a service and now only needs a low-cost subscription. I believe it’s delivering an 800X ROI, but those are my numbers.

Competition and differentiation

EET&D – There are plenty of consultants, incubators and platforms that claim to help utilities innovate. How is InnovationForce different?

Getgen – Consultants may produce reports, and incubators may help startups, but utilities need a system that can manage pilots at scale. That’s where innovation management comes in.

Innovation management is projected to be an $8 billion market by 2030. Some competitors have been around since the early 2000s and have focused on ideation, but not the pilot management. They’re the incumbent, and we’re the disruptor. We’re kind of coming in and shaking things up a little bit. What makes us different, and I think a stronger solution for utilities, is our background in energy.

We really wanted to solve this energy problem because we believed it was mission-critical for the planet. We also believe that the energy industry has the advantage of collaboration. It’s not as competitive as other industries. And so, what we’re trying to enable through software and AI is an ecosystem collaborating to solve problems faster. I didn't want to just build a platform that a single enterprise would use. I really wanted to build something that would drive industry transformation. And we knew because of our other co-founder of InnovationForce, Linda Hill's research, and [her book] “Collective Genius,” that ecosystem development around an idea marketplace was the number one thing the successful leaders of innovation did time and time again.

So that is kind of the new thing — the marketplace of ideas is basically a Small Language Model, generating industry-specific challenges, and matching them to solutions ready to be piloted. It’s exciting to see the scale we can get with AI to make the dream a reality. And we can create these idea marketplaces with AI on the fly — so any utility or startup can create their own curated marketplace to help sell ideas ready to pilot. That’s what stands out between us and everyone else.

The future of innovation in energy

EET&D – Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for innovation in energy?

Getgen – We’re at an inflection point. The grid is under enormous pressure — electrification, renewables, climate resilience and cybersecurity. Utilities can’t solve those problems alone, and startups can’t scale without utility adoption. The future is about collaboration at scale.

Innovation isn’t just about inventing new technology. It’s about getting the right solutions into the right places, quickly. That requires systems. AI will play a huge role, not as a magic bullet, but as a connective tool: It can read filings, track patterns and surface opportunities that would otherwise be missed. That frees up human innovators to focus on creativity, strategy and building trust.

What we’ve built is a common framework for innovation: identifying challenges, testing solutions and measuring results. The AI gives you scale and speed, but the framework gives you consistency.

EET&D – Do you see utilities becoming more open to collaboration?

Getgen – They have to. The challenges are too big for any one company or person to solve. What excites me is that we now have the tools to make collaboration real — not just talk about it. If we can create systems where ideas move faster, scale faster and prove their value faster, we can transform the grid in time to meet these challenges.

Conclusion

InnovationForce is still a startup, but it has a global presence. Due to Getgen’s experience on both the startup and utility side, she has a unique vantage point and understanding of how to unlock the industry’s most persistent bottlenecks. By systematizing the pilot process and embedding AI into the search for solutions, her team is aiming to make innovation less of a buzzword and more of a repeatable, scalable practice that anyone can follow.

For an industry facing unprecedented change, that shift could be the difference between incremental progress and true transformation.