Managing technology, innovation vital today

Research and development are two words that can mean great innovations, but also great costs.

In this day of global recession, an important way to run a business is to understand how to manage your technology, which could lead to greater innovations at companies. That was the topic of the Tuesday panel discussion entitled "Management of Technology" at OTC in Houston.

The financial crisis is a couple-of-years thing at the most," said Robert Armstrong, deputy director at the MIT Energy Initiative and the Chevron Professor of Chemistry at MIT. "It affects R&D because money is tight."

Armstrong pointed out technology development is a key element for the economy. The “role of technology development is the chief factor underlying economic growth," Armstrong said.

When talking about developing technology, Flavio de Moraes, wellhead manager at Petrobras, said that means innovation and bringing that down to an engineering exercise.

"Innovation only gains momentum when driven to implementation," he said.

He added his company looks to take steps toward innovation: Monitoring and foresight; technology strategy definition; portfolio management; R&D and engineering implementation.

The goal, he said, was to see what technology can do to better a company, industry, or country. He said the proper innovation can boost the amount of oil taken out of the ground.

"New technology will allow companies to recover over 3 trillion barrels of oil," de Moraes said. "To get there we have to keep the environment safe. We need to expand to limits. We need to find new frontiers."

Finding those new frontiers is what keeps Manuel Terranova, senior vice president of subsea product platform and commercial operations at GE-Vetcogray, involved with his team.

"Trends are pushing toward guaranteeing production of what you say you can produce, and that will mean more computational power," Terranova said. "I encourage our team to have the Robin Hood mentality. Leverage as much technology as you can from other businesses at GE."

But when it comes to innovation, there has to be an end result.

"There needs to be measurement and accountability of the people. We need to find out if they are doing what they said they should be doing," Terranova said. But on the other hand, sometimes things change. "Markets change, so you have to listen to your customers," he said.

"Reliable innovation is to make sure you have a commercially acceptable product at the end," he said.

Wafik Beydoun, manager of R&D and business development at Total, agreed innovation is the main driver for sustainable growth. "Technology innovation is a key to our business strategy," he said.

Sometimes, he said, you need to age an idea. "You need to nurture an idea. It needs to mature. You can't move too fast"

In the end, innovation comes down to a team approach. No one person will be able to act alone.

"We face major systemic challenges that need multi-disciplinary solutions," said Beverley Ronalds, group executive and chief of petroleum at Australia's CSIRO. "We encourage young and old scientists alike to work in that environment. We like to bring together common stakeholders and find the common-area sweet spot."

Francisco Ortigosa, director of geophysics at Repsol, agreed with Ronalds. He said some of the top factors to create innovation are the diversity of thinking and communication to people.

– Gregory Hale