From Telecom to Energy: How Reactive Technologies Applied Cross-Industry Expertise to Discover an Unmeasured Phenomenon

From Telecom to Energy: How Reactive Technologies Applied Cross-Industry Expertise to Discover an Unmeasured Phenomenon

Energy sector insiders had been operating power grids for 120 years. They knew everything about generation, transmission, and distribution. Yet they’d never measured the exact phenomenon that Reactive Technologies would build an entire company around—not because it wasn’t important, but because they’d never thought to look for it.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Marc Borrett, CEO and co-founder of Reactive Technologies, explained how his team’s telecom background led them to ask questions that energy experts never considered. Their outsider perspective didn’t just find a new approach to an existing problem—it revealed a phenomenon that had never been measured before.

The Parallel That Started Everything

Marc’s path to grid measurement began with pattern recognition across industries. After building a semiconductor company focused on near field communication technology, he started noticing striking similarities between two massive infrastructure transitions.

“The first company I co-founded was in semiconductors, and we were developing technology for near field communication,” Marc explains. “We saw the energy transition as being very similar to the kind of transition that the telecom sector went through from fixed line telephony to effectively voice over IP.”

The parallel was specific and actionable. “The energy sector was going from big power stations, pumping power down the wires into homes and businesses to now power being generated in homes and businesses and flowing the other way,” Marc notes. This bidirectional flow mirrored how telecommunications evolved from centralized switching to distributed networks.

The insight: “We saw that there were many similarities with the telecom sector, and if we brought that skillset to the energy sector, we might just be able to do things a bit differently and have better results.”

This wasn’t about applying telecom solutions to energy problems. It was about bringing a different way of thinking about infrastructure—one shaped by rapid technological change rather than century-long stability.

Asking Questions Insiders Never Consider

When Marc assembled his team at Reactive Technologies, he made a deliberate choice: hire from outside the energy sector. “When we set up the company, the engineering team that we built were all from the telecom sector,” he recalls.

This created a dynamic where basic assumptions about power grids were open to questioning. Telecom engineers think about networks as systems for transmitting information. Energy engineers think about grids as systems for transmitting power. That difference in mental models leads to fundamentally different questions.

“So when you have a group of engineers and you put them from the telecom sector and you put them into the energy sector, they want to do things like, can we use the power grid as a communications channel?” Marc explains.

To an energy insider, this question might seem misguided or irrelevant. Power grids move electricity, not data. But to telecom engineers, any network is potentially a communications medium. The question wasn’t naive—it came from a different set of first principles about what networks fundamentally are.

The Experiment That Revealed the Unmeasured

This outsider curiosity led to the experiment that would define the company. Reactive Technologies partnered with a UK grid operator to test whether they could transmit data signals through the entire power grid.

“We did a first project with a power grid operator in the UK, where we said we would send data through the entirety of the UK grid,” Marc recalls. “And to do that, we had to build something to create that data signal. And then we had to create some devices to hear and decode that signal out of all of the noise of all of the generation assets on the grid.”

They succeeded in transmitting the signal—but then noticed something unexpected. The signal didn’t reach all receiver devices at exactly the same time. For telecom engineers, this timing discrepancy was a problem to solve. But investigating that problem revealed something far more valuable.

“When we looked at our data that we found that our signal didn’t travel and get received by each of the measurement or receiver devices as they were then at exactly the same time. And that bothered our engineers,” Marc explains.

The investigation uncovered the key insight: “When they looked into it, they found that there was something that was inhibiting our signal getting through the grid. And that thing that was inhibiting it was the stability of the grid. So, basically, we found that the more stable the grid was, it was harder for us to get our message through where the grid was weaker and less stable. It was easier for us to get our message through.”

This discovery only happened because the team was trying to do something energy insiders would never attempt. Their “failed” communications experiment revealed a measurable phenomenon that had never been captured in real time.

Why Energy Insiders Missed It

To understand why this discovery required outside perspective, Marc offers a thought experiment about technological progress. If you could bring back Alexander Graham Bell and Nikolai Tesla from history and show Bell a smartphone while showing Tesla a modern power grid, “Alexander Graham Bell would not recognize what you’ve given him as a phone, but obviously, Nikolai Tesla would have a fairly good understanding of what was actually still going on in the power industry.”

The energy sector’s stability had been its strength for over a century. When generation sources were predictable—coal, gas, nuclear—extensive measurement wasn’t necessary. “The toolkit that exists is based on the old world, where everything is entirely stable, so very little is measured, but lots of things are modeled,” Marc notes.

But this stability created blind spots. Energy professionals built mental models around predictable generation and one-way power flow. Their expertise was optimized for a world that was rapidly changing. The renewable transition introduces intermittency and bidirectional flow—exactly the dynamics that telecom networks handle routinely.

“Those kind of stable generation sources are being replaced by things that are much more intermittent. A solar farm only produces power when the sun’s out. A wind farm only produces power when it’s windy,” Marc explains. “And fundamentally that changes how the power system actually behaves.”

The Pivot From Failure to Category Creation

Discovering an unmeasured phenomenon is one thing. Recognizing it as a business opportunity requires a different kind of insight. When Reactive Technologies’ engineers understood what their timing discrepancies revealed, Marc made a crucial decision.

“We went back to the grid operator, and we said, look, we could turn this on its head and we could measure stability in real time. Would that be of interest? And that was really where we actually got started with measuring grid stability.”

This pivot only worked because of the credibility their cross-industry expertise provided. Grid operators took the meeting not because Reactive Technologies were energy experts, but precisely because they weren’t. Their telecom background gave them permission to explore unconventional approaches.

The lesson: adjacent industry expertise creates credibility through difference, not similarity. You’re not competing on domain knowledge—you’re offering a fresh perspective that insiders can’t generate internally.

The Framework for Cross-Industry Innovation

Reactive Technologies’ journey reveals a repeatable pattern for applying cross-industry expertise to conservative sectors:

First, identify structural parallels between industries undergoing similar transitions. Marc’s insight about telecom and energy wasn’t superficial—both involve infrastructure networks transitioning from centralized to distributed architectures.

Second, hire for cognitive diversity, not domain expertise. Build teams that bring different mental models and ask questions insiders consider naive or irrelevant.

Third, conduct experiments that seem tangential to core industry problems. The grid communications experiment had no obvious commercial application, but it created conditions for discovering something valuable.

Fourth, stay alert for unexpected results that bother your team. The timing discrepancies that troubled Reactive Technologies’ engineers would have been dismissed by energy insiders as measurement error or irrelevant noise.

Finally, recognize when a “failure” reveals a bigger opportunity. The communications experiment didn’t work as intended, but it exposed a phenomenon more valuable than the original goal.

When Outside Perspective Becomes Defensible Advantage

Cross-industry expertise creates initial opportunity, but it doesn’t guarantee sustainable advantage. Reactive Technologies had to combine their outside perspective with deep technical credibility in the energy sector.

The years they spent proving their measurement technology to skeptical grid operators transformed their cross-industry background from novelty to authority. They weren’t just telecom people playing in energy—they became the experts on a phenomenon that energy insiders had never measured.

This combination—outside perspective that reveals new opportunities, paired with technical depth that earns insider credibility—creates defensible market positions that pure domain experts or pure outsiders can’t match.

For founders considering conservative industries, the insight isn’t that outside perspective alone wins. It’s that adjacent industry expertise lets you ask different questions, and those different questions can reveal opportunities that insiders will never discover on their own.