Individual-level innovation in the upstream oil & gas industry: Insights from a global survey

Abstract

The transition to a lower-carbon world is significantly underway, but oil & gas will likely continue to play an important role in the world's energy mix for many years to come. At the same time, though, the industry is undergoing significant change on several fronts, and technology and innovation will accordingly play a pivotal role in the future of the sector. Building upon the first Society of Petroleum Engineers Global Innovation Survey, this paper presents the findings from the follow-up survey to examine these processes again. However, whereas the first survey looked at innovation at the business unit level, this investigation explores this phenomenon from the point of view of individual people. Through the application of tools from the field of organizational psychology, this survey was designed to find out who the “explorers” are within the oil & gas sector that are hardwired to deliver tomorrow's bolder technologies, and who the “exploiters” are that are more inclined to prefer modest improvements to existing solutions. We found several potentially useful patterns in the data. First, respondents who have graduate degrees were more likely to engage in exploration kinds of behaviors than those who do not. Second, age had little bearing on whether or not a respondent exhibited exploration kinds of behaviors. Third, respondents who spent their formative years before the age of 18 in Norway, Russia, or Indonesia tended to engage in more exploration kinds of activity than most others. Fourth, respondents working in Brazil, China, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Venezuela at the time of the survey all reported lower levels of exploration-like behavior than their counterparts elsewhere. The paper concludes with recommendations for future investigations in this area.