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Out of over 200 applicants from more than 40 countries, Manual.to was crowned the global winner of Elia Group’s Open Innovation Challenge 2025. The theme? “People First.”
This is not just an award. It is a recognition that the energy transition—one of the most complex transformations in industrial history—depends not only on infrastructure but on the people who build, maintain, and operate it.
Elia Group is Europe’s fifth-largest transmission system operator. Through its subsidiaries Elia (Belgium) and 50Hertz (Germany), the group operates over 19,000 kilometers of high-voltage connections, supplying electricity to 30 million end users with 99.99% reliability.
Every year, Elia launches an Open Innovation Challenge to identify breakthrough solutions for critical business challenges. Previous editions focused on infrastructure delivery, grid optimization, and project management. Winners receive up to €50,000 to develop a proof of concept with Elia Group support.
The 2025 edition was different. Under the slogan “People First,” Elia shifted focus from hardware to humans—recognizing that the energy transition’s success depends on the workforce behind the operations.
Elia identified four domains where innovation could transform workforce capabilities:
Knowledge Transfer: Capturing, sharing, and leveraging organizational knowledge. The challenge: experienced workers retiring, taking decades of expertise with them. The opportunity: making institutional knowledge accessible, trainable, scalable.
Cultural Change: Adapting organizational culture to rapid transformation. Supporting leadership participation in change initiatives. Fostering inclusive, sustainable workplace values.
Safety and Security: Improving resilience against cybersecurity threats. Using behavioral learning to reinforce best practices around high-voltage infrastructure. Building a culture where safety is embedded, not enforced.
Wellbeing and Health: Supporting physical and mental resilience. Tools for emotional wellbeing. Holistic approaches to workforce health in high-pressure environments.
The judges selected Manual.to for a clear reason: knowledge transfer is the foundation on which all other workforce challenges depend.
Cultural change requires shared understanding. Safety depends on consistent training. Wellbeing improves when workers feel competent and confident. All of this starts with knowledge—captured, accessible, and actionable.
The energy industry faces a convergence of workforce pressures that make knowledge transfer existentially important:
Aging workforce: Industry reports indicate that approximately 25% of utility workers are expected to retire by 2030. The average age of employees in the sector is above 50. Each retirement represents not just a vacant position but decades of accumulated expertise walking out the door.
Skills gap acceleration: Field Service News reports that 73% of organizations have identified an aging workforce as a potential threat to their operations. The gap between retiring expertise and incoming capability is widening, not narrowing.
Technology transformation: The energy transition demands new skills—smart grid management, renewable integration, digital monitoring, predictive maintenance. Workers must learn new technologies while still maintaining legacy systems. The pace of change exceeds traditional training capacity.
Infrastructure complexity: High-voltage transmission systems are among the most complex engineering environments on Earth. Procedures for maintenance, troubleshooting, and emergency response cannot be improvised. They must be documented, standardized, and accessible—instantly.
The conventional response to knowledge transfer involves mentorship programs, classroom training, and documentation systems. Each has fundamental limitations in the energy sector context:
Mentorship requires time: Pairing experienced workers with newcomers is effective but does not scale. When 25% of your workforce retires within five years, you cannot mentor your way out of the problem. There are not enough mentors, and there is not enough time.
Classroom training disconnects from reality: Utility workers operate in the field—substations, transmission lines, control rooms. Classroom sessions cannot replicate the complexity of real-world scenarios. The gap between training and application creates risk.
Documentation becomes obsolete: Traditional documentation systems—manuals, binders, PDFs—are slow to create, difficult to update, and rarely accessible at the point of need. By the time a procedure is documented, approved, and distributed, it may already be outdated.
The result: institutional knowledge remains locked in the heads of experienced workers, unavailable to those who need it most.
Manual.to won the Elia Open Innovation Challenge because it addresses knowledge transfer at the speed the energy transition demands.
The core innovation is radical simplicity: capture any process in 60 seconds. Record a video of the task. AI transforms that video into structured, step-by-step instructions—with automatic cuts, annotations, and translations into multiple languages.
What traditionally takes days of documentation work happens in under a minute.
This changes the economics of knowledge capture entirely. When documentation takes days, only critical procedures get documented. When documentation takes seconds, everything gets documented—including the informal know-how that experienced workers take for granted.
Digital manuals are accessible via QR codes placed at any location—substations, equipment panels, control rooms, vehicles. Workers scan and access instructions instantly, in their language, on any device.
This transforms knowledge from something stored in systems to something available at the moment of need. The worker standing in front of unfamiliar equipment does not need to call for help, search databases, or guess. The knowledge is there, immediately.
Utility workers do not sit at desks. They work in challenging environments—outdoors, in confined spaces, around high-voltage equipment. Traditional documentation systems assume desktop access and time for research. Manual.to assumes mobile access and urgency.
The platform is designed for deskless workers: visual instructions, minimal text, instant loading, offline capability. Information is delivered in the format that field workers actually use.
With the proof of concept awarded through the Open Innovation Challenge, Elia will deploy Manual.to to address specific workforce challenges in their operations.
New technicians can access visual, step-by-step guidance from day one. Instead of shadowing experienced workers for weeks, they can learn procedures independently while still having expert knowledge available. This accelerates time-to-productivity without sacrificing quality or safety.
Complex procedures—equipment maintenance, safety protocols, emergency responses—are captured in video format that shows exactly what to do. Written instructions describe; video instructions demonstrate. For technical work, the difference matters.
Training does not end when onboarding ends. Workers encounter unfamiliar situations throughout their careers—new equipment, updated procedures, edge cases. Manual.to makes learning continuous: scan, watch, execute. No delay, no dependency on experts being available.
When experienced workers document their expertise in Manual.to, that knowledge becomes organizational property—preserved, searchable, improvable. Retirements no longer mean knowledge loss. The institutional memory survives personnel changes.
Ultimately, better knowledge transfer means better grid operations. Faster maintenance, fewer errors, more consistent procedures across teams and locations. For a transmission system operator serving 30 million people, these improvements translate directly into reliability and safety.
Elia’s choice of “People First” as the 2025 theme reflects a growing recognition across the energy sector: technology alone cannot deliver the energy transition.
Europe aims to nearly completely decarbonize its electricity sector by 2050. This requires massive infrastructure investment—renewable generation, grid expansion, storage systems, smart grid technology. But infrastructure without competent operators is infrastructure at risk.
The International Energy Agency estimates that half of workers in fossil fuel–dependent sectors have skills transferable to clean energy. But “transferable” does not mean “immediately deployable.” Even workers with relevant foundations require on-the-job training, procedural knowledge, and operational experience specific to their new roles.
Grid infrastructure projects have average lead times of ten years. Workforce development cannot operate on the same timeline. When new substations, transmission lines, or renewable integration points come online, trained workers must be ready to operate them—not eventually, but immediately.
This creates a fundamental mismatch: infrastructure development is slow and capital-intensive; workforce development must be fast and scalable. Traditional training approaches cannot bridge this gap. Technology must.
Global consultancy EY observes that manufacturers—and by extension, all industrial operators—must use digital tools to capture and convert tribal knowledge into institutional knowledge that stays with the company and can be broadly leveraged across the organization.
The energy sector epitomizes this challenge. Decades of operational experience exist in the minds of workers who entered the industry when it operated differently. Their knowledge of edge cases, failure modes, and practical workarounds is invaluable—and largely undocumented.
Manual.to provides the mechanism to capture this knowledge before it disappears. Not through lengthy documentation projects, but through quick captures integrated into daily work. The expert demonstrates; the system documents; the organization learns.
In his acceptance of the award, Manual.to’s team emphasized a principle that resonated with the Elia judges: “Innovation only matters when it’s adopted.”
The energy sector is not short of innovative technologies. What it often lacks is adoption—the translation of promising solutions into operational reality. Tools that are complex, slow, or disconnected from frontline work remain pilots forever.
For digital tools to scale in industrial environments, they must be easy, fast, and fun to use. This is not a marketing claim—it is an operational requirement.
Easy: Workers should not need extensive training to use a training tool. If the solution requires specialists to operate, it cannot scale to the frontline.
Fast: If documentation takes longer than the task it documents, it will not get done. Speed of capture determines volume of capture.
Fun: Workers who enjoy using a tool use it more. Engagement drives adoption. Adoption drives value.
Manual.to was designed around these principles. The One-Take Manual approach makes capture easy. AI processing makes output fast. Video-based creation makes the process engaging rather than tedious.
Manual.to is already deployed at companies including Audi, Volvo, Nike, P&G, Microsoft, Barilla, and DuPont. These organizations operate complex manufacturing and logistics environments where knowledge transfer determines operational success.
The Elia partnership extends this proven approach into the energy sector—where the stakes include not just operational efficiency but grid reliability and public safety.
The Open Innovation Challenge 2025 results signal a shift in how energy companies approach workforce development. The winning solution is not a training platform, an LMS, or a knowledge management system in the traditional sense. It is a tool that makes knowledge capture effortless and knowledge access instant.
Traditional workforce development treats training as an event—something that happens in classrooms, on schedules, separate from work. The Manual.to approach treats learning as continuous—embedded in work, available on demand, updated in real time.
This shift matters because the energy sector’s knowledge requirements are not static. New technologies, updated regulations, evolving best practices—the learning never stops. Systems that support continuous learning will outperform systems that support periodic training.
In traditional operations, knowledge concentrates with experts. Newcomers depend on senior workers for guidance. This creates bottlenecks, single points of failure, and knowledge loss when experts leave.
Digital work instructions distribute knowledge across the organization. Anyone can access any procedure. Expertise becomes organizational capability rather than individual possession. This democratization of knowledge increases resilience and reduces risk.
Documentation has traditionally been a burden—something workers do in addition to their real work. This creates resistance, shortcuts, and gaps. When documentation is time-consuming, it happens only when mandated.
The One-Take Manual approach integrates capture into work itself. The worker performs the task; the system creates the documentation. This removes the burden and ensures completeness. Everything that gets done can get documented.
The metaphor chosen for the award announcement—”knowledge should flow like electricity”—captures the vision precisely.
Electricity flows continuously through the grid, available instantly wherever it is needed. It does not wait for requests or require advance planning. The infrastructure ensures availability; the user simply accesses it.
Knowledge in organizations should work the same way. It should be always available, instantly accessible, delivered to the point of need. The infrastructure—in this case, Manual.to—ensures availability; the worker simply accesses it.
For Elia, whose mission is ensuring electricity flows reliably to 30 million people, the parallel is particularly apt. The same commitment to reliability, accessibility, and continuous availability that defines their grid operations can now define their knowledge operations.
With the €50,000 proof of concept grant and support from Elia Group staff, Manual.to will now work directly with Elia’s operations teams to deploy and validate the solution in real-world energy transmission environments.
The proof of concept will demonstrate how digital work instructions can accelerate maintenance workflows, preserve expert knowledge, enable faster onboarding, and support the consistent execution of safety-critical procedures across Elia’s operations.
Success in this proof of concept could establish a model for knowledge transfer across the European energy sector—and beyond.
The future of energy depends on the people who build, maintain, and operate the grid.
Manual.to ensures their knowledge flows like electricity—always available, instantly accessible, powering what matters.
Schedule a demo with our Manual.to specialists