This year’s Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation (GFNI) equipped attendees with tools to turn ambition into action in their daily work
As a senior regulatory policy officer at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC), Kevin Lee’s job responsibilities are understandably wide ranging. But there’s a common thread that flows through virtually all of Lee’s duties: the need to drive innovation.
Indeed, Lee created and now leads the Disruptive, Emerging, and Innovative Technology (DIET) team at CNSC. DIET is charged with prepping his agency to evaluate and regulate nuclear activities that incorporate new technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and additive manufacturing. Lee previously worked on CNSC efforts to evolve and modernize the commission’s regulatory framework to be ready for small modular reactors (SMRs) and advanced reactor technology.
Not surprisingly, Lee’s work requires attending events focused on everything from new reactor technologies and regulations to emerging technologies. While the events are valuable opportunities to collaborate with colleagues and hear about their experiences, Lee doesn’t view them as forums to learn new things. “You usually already know what people are going to talk about and you have some familiarity with the subject matter,” Lee said.
A Different Type of Event
But that was not the case for Lee at the most recent Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation (GFNI), which was held this past June in Miami. The event in Florida was the third GFNI, an event dedicated to building innovative cultures and behaviors throughout the global industry to ensure nuclear can reach its full potential as a source of carbon-free energy. The GFNI in Miami built upon the successes of the first two events. The inaugural gathering in South Korea in 2019 identified four technological innovations that could drive meaningful progress in the industry. The 2022 event in London centered on the necessity of creating innovative cultures and pinpointed four behaviors that can bolster innovation in organizations.
The gathering in Miami was the first GFNI Lee attended. While he wasn’t exposed to any unfamiliar information, Lee found the three-day experience challenging and expansive in ways he did not expect. “What I really found interesting, and it’s probably something I’m going to use as an approach at CNSC, was when they had us play games,” said Lee, who noted that he was initially skeptical about the value of playing games like Connect-4, Jenga, and Kerplunk. “At first, I was thinking, okay, I’m a little old for this, but I’ll play along.”
However, the rationale behind playing games and many other activities at GFNI was not team building or camaraderie. Instead, it was to convey and utilize the attributes and behaviors needed to translate ambitions around innovation into tangible action. For Lee, the game playing and collaboration in small groups was dynamic and instructive.
“We started realizing that we were utilizing parts of our brain that we don’t usually use at work,” Lee said. “I was really impressed with some of the ideas that came up in that session. From a hands-on practical level, it showed how you can get a group of people together who have never met who have a common interest in innovation within nuclear and have them work together for a very short period and come up with some innovative, cool, neat ways of thinking.” For example, one idea that bubbled up was about an international, web-based network that connected people with specific skills to jobs.
Lee can envision using some of what he learned at GFNI for his work at the CNSC. For instance, teaching innovative attributes through game playing is a tool that could help Lee and his staff develop digital solutions that make it simpler and easier to produce commission member documents or even to schedule staff travel. “I may use the games to walk people through how to think differently about how we can make things better, faster, and a lot more efficient using digital solutions,” Lee said.
A Framework for Innovation
The fact that Lee came away from GFNI with tangible ideas about developing and implementing innovative ideas in his organization is exactly what the event organizers hoped would happen. An EPRI Journal article earlier this year chronicled a year-long effort in advance of the GFNI in Miami to develop a practical framework professionals in the nuclear industry can use to translate ambitions to innovate—and to be clear, the industry is full of people with big, bold ideas—into action. The framework was intentionally designed to be useful for people in any size or type of organization located anywhere in the world.
The introduction of the framework to translate ambition into action was the centerpiece of this year’s GFNI, which brought together over 150 people from 20 nations, including representatives from utilities, technology companies, regulators, academia, and entrepreneurs. The earlier EPRI Journal story provides details about the framework, which has three basic steps:
- Define the ambition: Innovation can take many forms, which can make defining its purpose elusive. But clearly defining the ambition and outcomes sought is an important step in driving innovation.
- Identify the actions: Getting from point A to point B requires action. Similarly, achieving a defined ambition and outcomes will only happen by completing a set of actions. Actions are taken at the individual, team, and organizational level and drive progress towards milestones and, ultimately, the defined ambition.
- Balancing the barriers: and enablers Any project inevitably must balance challenges and obstacles with the support and positive attributes driving its progress. In some cases, barriers and enablers are the same, but whether they are positive or negative forces comes down to their execution. Identifying barriers and enablers is an important step in guiding which actions will help achieve the ambition.
Making the Framework Actionable
Just as the mission of this year’s GFNI was to turn ambition into action, the event itself included activities to help attendees translate the framework for innovation into effective attitudes and behaviors. For example, building on its successful use at the London gathering, the GFNI in Miami featured a Bitesize Behaviors workshop.
Specifically, the workshop was designed to underscore the importance of four behaviors essential to innovation. They are:
A Challenger Mindset
Innovation demands doing things differently. For many people, questioning the status quo can be uncomfortable. A challenger mindset means having the confidence to challenge how things are normally done, embracing the instructive power of failure, the willingness to be open-minded, and encouraging shifts in culture needed to drive innovation.
Diversity in Thought
Group think is the enemy of innovation. Generating the types of new ideas that foster innovation means questioning the thought patterns that settle in through our education and work lives. One key to redirecting common pathways of thought is to embrace ‘what if’ thinking, which encourages new ideas and approaches to problems.
Courage
The discomfort that naturally spikes when questioning accepted ideas and processes provides a strong incentive to never suggest or try anything new. Breaking out of that rut requires courage to challenge the status quo and take calculated risks.
Role Model and Diversity
Diverse teams with different experiences and viewpoints are more innovative than groups of like-minded people, which is why it’s so important to build teams with varied backgrounds and to recognize and role model that there is no one formula or source of innovation.
Practicing New Skills
It’s one thing to learn new concepts and modes of thinking that can help drive innovation. Utilizing them takes practice, which was the rationale behind GFNI’s hackathon activity. Before dividing into teams for the hackathon, attendees received training in design thinking. Design thinking is geared towards developing innovative solutions for unconventional uses and challenges, such as designing a car ideally suited for a dog rather than a human. Ideally suited for complex or ill-defined challenges—which are common in the nuclear industry—design thinking rewards collaboration, creativity, and focus on the end user’s experience and goals.
The design thinking methodology GFNI participants trained on included six steps:
Seven teams took their training and applied it to develop new ideas to address industry challenges. The hackathon teams then presented their ideas to judges. Florencia Renteria served as a facilitator guiding one of the hackathon teams. Renteria is a scientific and strategic advisor for the Women in Nuclear Young Generation group and has extensive experience with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other organizations.
Innovation has been central to Renteria’s PhD research and her professional career. “You have a lot of tools like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and quantum computing,” Renteria said. “How are we going to integrate those tools into a framework or infrastructure development for the coming years because the technology is accelerating? We have a lot of innovations going, and some need to be organized systematically to recognize how to implement them.”
In the hackathon, teams were charged with using the innovation methodology they learned at GFNI. While the original task was to focus on applying the methodology to one scenario, Renteria’s team insisted on combining three scenarios together. “They didn’t want to limit themselves to one challenge, and the team preferred to integrate more items into the concept,” Renteria said.
The mere fact that Renteria’s group wanted to expand the ambition of their work is a good indication that the main message of GFNI was having an impact on attendees. But Renteria also says that her group found real value in identifying enablers and barriers as a tool to accelerate innovation. “Sometimes, we think that we have to build something from scratch to be innovative. But it’s very useful to have a framework that guides you to identify enablers and barriers and organize information systematically,” Renteria said. “It’s more like a puzzle we are building based on a certain frame, and I think it helps accelerate innovation.”
For Renteria, the value of the framework introduced at GFNI will multiply as instruction about its application spreads. This is particularly important for early career professionals in the nuclear industry. “The earlier we start implementing and exposing the framework to the younger generation, the better we can accelerate capacity building,” Renteria said. One way to do that, suggests Renteria, is by holding mini hackathons online and incorporating them into other industry events.
Innovation Can Apply Everywhere
At first blush, it may not seem as though Chris Saville’s job at Duke Energy has much need for innovation. Saville, a lead engineer at Duke, is part of a team that is working on securing license renewals for its fleet of eleven commercial reactors to operate for 20 more years.
But Saville understands that new approaches—another way to say innovation—to relicensing can make the process more efficient. “An example of that would be putting all our application’s technical information into computer software which then prints it out and organizes it and formats it,” Saville said. “We are working on our second application now, but for our first project we did all of that manually by hand using Word and Adobe and it was very time consuming and painful. We’re still perfecting this tool, but we are going to use it for the rest of our fleet.”
Another example of innovation is how Duke is also using AI to go through 10 years of plant operating data to look for any signs of aging impacts. This is a task that Saville describes as being akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, and the application of AI can accelerate and improve the work. Given these initiatives, it’s no surprise that the GFNI theme of turning ambition into action resonated with Saville. “The theme of turning ambition into action is important to talk about because a lot of times in nuclear we say, well, we can’t fail, and we’re going to be ultra conservative,” Saville said. “That has its place with safety. But there are areas, especially in project work, where you can find areas to improve and try new things, even if you fail.”
Already focused on how innovation can improve his day-to-day work, Saville brought home additional ideas from GFNI that he hopes will help. One came from his participation in the Hackathon, specifically the direction to not self-censor when first brainstorming ideas for solving a challenge. “Just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. If you have an idea for a solution, maybe it’s not a good solution or maybe it’s a partial solution,” Saville said. “I think that approach allows us to think more outside the box freely. You don’t have to present a solution that fixes everything upfront. This gets the conversation going.”
Saville also appreciated the GFNI workshop about storytelling. Which may seem odd, since the relicensing applications he works on are thousands of pages full of technical information. But Saville sees the value of storytelling in communicating what all that technical information actually means. “We want to take the conclusions from our work and tell the story about the condition of the plant, what we’re going to do to keep the plant in good condition, and why it’s safe to operate for 20 more years when it was originally designed for 40,” Saville said. “The way we tell that story is important to our audience, which is the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) and the public.”
EPRI Technical Expert:
Heather Feldman
