“You can’t wait for change to come from the bottom up,” Paradigm E&P president and chief executive John Gibson says in OilandGasInvestor.com’s “Driving Innovation and Efficiency in the Digital Oil Field” webinar. Register for the archived webinar here. Executive management must drive change, “and you’re going to have to assign it to someone,” and certainly that individual must be highly motivated to effect results, he adds. Gibson is joined in the webinar by Randy Clark, president and CEO of energy-standards promoter Energistics, and Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of the Internet-based problem-solving service InnoCentive Inc. The innovation leaders discuss technology that produces to the bottom line, with productivity gains and cost reductions. Highlights include: -- Discussion of what kind of technology and innovations will be driving the oil industry 20 years from now. -- How to create a corporate culture of open innovation. -- How to solve in-house problems through an outsource channel of more than 170,000 highly educated professionals across a multitude of disciplines. Gibson says innovation requires an entire corporate mindset. “Even if you receive a brilliant, innovative solution, you have natural antibodies in your company that attack it because it’s not their idea.” Spradlin says companies in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, post challenges on Waltham, Massachusetts-based InnoCentive’s website, and offer a reward. The registered problem-solvers can view the challenge and work to develop solutions. “When I look at the economy, with companies are forced to meet market shares, innovation is absolutely essential,” Spradlin says. By outsourcing problem-solving in a reward-based setting, “you are principally paying for success rather than failures within the organization.” Clark says the energy industry needs greater standardization. In the 1980s, Phillips and Sony worked together to develop the standard compact disc. Collaboration suggested that each were conceding market share; instead, billions of CDs were in circulation by 1992. In the same way, the energy industry needs to adopt singular energy applications to exchange information more effectively, Clark says. Clark gives the example of standardization by StatoilHydro. The company estimated a few years ago that more than $40 billion of value could be gained from production optimization in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. To enforce optimization, StatoilHydro implemented 100% of drilling info delivered WIT SML, Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language. The standardized language enabled StatoilHydro to reduce cycle time and to archive all information in the same format. In an industry that is losing experienced personnel to retirement, standardization contributes to continuity and retention of critical information, and helps compensate for the loss of hands-on people. It ensures financial strength, helps to find production opportunities in new and existing fields, and increases operational efficiencies across the E&P life-cycle. One standard reduces data duplication, errors and cycle times, and it improves accuracy and the ease of data-sharing. Gibson urges, “Don’t give up.” Hear the entire one-hour presentation and view the speakers’ slideshows here: register here. Lindsay Goodier, Online Editor, OilandGasInvestor.com