?“You can’t wait for change to come from the bottom up,” Paradigm E&P president and chief executive John Gibson said recently during a webinar, “Driving Innovation and Efficiency in the Digital Oilfield,” hosted by OilandGasInvestor.com.


Executive management must drive change. “You’re going to have to assign it to someone,” and certainly that individual must be highly motivated to effect the results.”


Gibson was joined in the webinar by Randy Clark, president and chief executive officer of energy-standards promoter Energistics; and Dwayne Spradlin, president and CEO of the Internet-based problem-solving service InnoCentive Inc. They detailed technology that produces to the bottom line, with productivity gains and cost reductions.


Gibson said 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.”


Companies in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, post their challenges on Waltham, Massachusetts-based InnoCentive’s website, and offer a reward for solutions, said Spradlin. The registered problem-solvers can view the challenge and work to develop solutions. “When I look at the economy, with companies forced to meet market shares, innovation is absolutely essential,” he said.


By outsourcing problem-solving in a reward-based setting, “you are principally paying for success rather than failures within the organization.”


The energy industry needs greater standardization, said Clark. 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 offered 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 information delivered in WIT SML (Wellsite Information Transfer Standard Markup Language). The standardized language enabled StatoilHydro to reduce cycle time and to archive all the 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, the executives said.
It ensures financial strength, helps to identify production opportunities in new and existing fields, and increases operational efficiencies across the E&P life-cycle. Having one standard re?duces data duplication, errors and cycle times, and it improves accuracy and data-sharing.

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