‘It’s only when you see 49-ton trucks in China running on batteries that you realize how serious electrification is’: Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson on Europe’s incumbency problem

The brutal business of selling mirrors is not for the faint-hearted. The challenge is category differentiation, given that a mirror has one simple task—reflection. One of Greg Jackson’s first jobs was working for a mirror manufacturer which, at best, broke even or made a small profit. And then he had an idea. 

“We started making mirrors that had really wide frames,” the founder of Octopus Energy (the U.K.’s largest energy provider) told me. “And on a picture [on the internet], suddenly we had a mirror that looked different from everybody else’s. And they sold like hotcakes – and that transformed the business.” 

Approaching a business from a different point of view is an essential ingredient in the hunt for innovation. Jackson’s essential insight when it came to mirrors was that, online, every product looked the same. That is what the customer saw. And he realized that if the customer saw something different (a mirror with a wide frame), they might buy it. Which they did. 

Not seeing something that is obvious to an outsider is a firm’s “incumbency cost”— embedded in the regular behavior of doing the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday. It is one of the most significant brakes on the ability to grow. 

“I think the single biggest factor affecting Europe—and an issue the U.S. is not immune to—is incumbency,” he told me. “China and the Gulf are not held back by incumbent industries. Instead they are, at huge pace, delivering the new world. If I look at electric vehicles as an example, there’s not an incumbent car industry in China that’s struggling to manage the........

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