How can organisational culture influence digitalisation of the wind energy sector?

Digitalisation is widely recognised as a key enabler for accelerating global wind energy deployment. “Digitalisation” refers to the organisational and industry-wide use of data and digital technologies to improve efficiency, create insights, and develop products and services. Digitalisation not only plays an important role in generating innovation in organisations, but also accelerates the digital transition, where digital technologies streamline processes, enabling faster and more efficient innovation. However, digital technologies can create tension between old values and new ones, making a so-called “digital organisational culture” a prerequisite for the success of these technologies. “Organisational culture” refers to an organisation's beliefs, values and attitudes, and how these influence the behaviour of its employees. “Digital organisational culture” refers to aspects of organisational culture that specifically influence digitalisation, such as instilling a collaborative mindset, a clear orientation towards digital technology changes inside the company's culture, a culture of digital innovation and change and a transparent digital strategy. A recent review on the challenges of digitalisation in wind energy showed that organisational culture is one of the three main challenges. It was suggested that aspects of organisational culture such as open feedback culture, positive failure culture, creative culture, and innovation culture can have a large impact on digitalisation, e.g. by affecting how readily data is shared, how digital technologies are tried and tested, or how AI systems and digital twins are designed and used. We are not aware of any studies to understand organisational culture and digitalisation for the wind energy sector, although the above-mentioned review shows that there are some particular challenges in the wind energy sector, such as extreme siloed attitudes, lack of data sharing, lack of data and metadata standards, combined with a high volume and complexity of data coming off wind turbines, which warrant studying in more detail. Therefore, this work aims to understand how organisational culture can influence digitalisation in the wind energy sector, and is based on the results of the IEA Wind Task 43 Culture Questionnaire.