Improving the oil & gas industry innovation with a strategic fuel: Distributed research and development

The Brazilian oil & gas (O&G) industry has increased significantly for the last years, especially during the process of breaking the state monopoly, in 1997. The industry impacts directly on national economy, its contribution to GDP grew more than three times since 1998, when it was almost 3%, and in 2007 the rate increased to about 11% of GDP. Energy integration with neighboring countries such as Argentina, Bolivia or Venezuela also contributes to value this sector. The importance and great opportunities of the O&G sector force its companies to pursue new technologies aiming at efficiency and flexibility, and then become more competitive. In Brazil, this type of innovation process occurs mostly through university-industry cooperation, however the gap between university and industry is still huge. This paper presents a method for coordination distributed R&D projects for a big O&G company, using the concepts of collaborative partnerships, open innovation and distributed research and development strategy. The method is illustrated by a case study.