Department aims to ‘nudge’ small companies to take action with aim of saving up to £500 million per year
The Department for Business, Energy, Innovation and Skills (BEIS) is laying the ground to build a digital system to encourage small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to become more energy-efficient.
It is looking for a specialist agile development team on an alpha phase of the project, which will involve building three prototypes designed to ‘nudge’ small companies into taking action to save on their energy consumption.
The department said the discovery phase included user research that showed the majority of SMEs have an extremely low awareness of energy efficiency, and there is a need to get more of them aiming for an improvement.
It is also aiming to get third parties such as trade associations to encourage their members to introduce relevant measures. It has estimated that nationally it could all save SMEs £500 million per year.
BEIS is aiming to produce the prototypes over three months, and any service developed would have to be in line with the Government’s Digital Service Standard.
Image (amended) by Nicholas Petrone, CC BY 2.0 through flickr
