Cleaning Up Our Act: Systems Engineering to Promote Business Model Innovation for the Offshore Exploration and Production Supply Chain Operations

Abstract

Oil and gas offshore exploration and production (E & P) will remain necessary to meet increasing global energy demands. However, appraising and exploring these resources has a major impact on sustainability and faces many challenges. Improving the supply chain operations that support E&P activities presents opportunities to contribute to the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but relies on organizations being able to adopt new strategies and technology and, innovate their current business models. Business model innovation (BMI) has not been actively pursued in this industry, partially due to the traditional operation management and due to the complexity in changing established models or adopting full-fledged archetypes. Thus, the present study proposes a more flexible and granular approach to BMI by defining elements to be adopted rather than proposing business models archetypes. To define the elements, an application of systems engineering (SE) is adopted through a morphological analysis (MA). They are presented in morphological boxes in three dimensions—technology, organization, and the human element—inspired by sustainable business model (SBM) literature. The elements are proposed as “bricks” for BMI where they can be adopted and re-arranged as necessary, providing granularity and flexibility to facilitate BMI for organizations of varying sizes.