Sirius: Collaboration across the digital divides in the oil and gas supply chain

This paper describes how we have succeeded in setting up industry-university collaboration in SIRIUS, a centre for research-based innovation on digitalization in the oil and gas industry. Funded through the Norwegian Research Council's programmes for centres of excellence, it is comparable to what Champenois and Etzkowitz (2017) refer to as a hybrid autonomous organization. The centre consists of academic researchers from two of Norway's largest universities and the University of Oxford. The indus-try partners represent the ecosystem of companies in the oil and gas industry, with one major operator, a major oil service company, and a set of vendor companies who specialize in different aspects of digitali-zation. Centres for research-based innovation have two masters: they must deliver world class research for the universities and funding bodies and useful innovation for the partner companies. Drawing upon Gibbons et al.'s (1994) insight that knowledge is produced in industry-university collaborations only to the extent that the interests of all stakeholders are included, we therefore find that a key to succeeding in SIRIUS begins with explicitly acknowledging that research institutions and companies participate in the centre to further on-going activities on digitalization within their respective organizations. Another key to success is that we combine the strengths of the centre's networked organization with a formalized project qualification pipeline. This requires investment of intellectual resources in extensive prospecting for innovation and research ideas. We call this scoping. These then mature through standard stage-gate, with mature ideas resulting in collaborative piloting and innovation projects. This approach has been set in place and tried out for two years. It has generated a promising portfolio of industrially relevant project ideas, a first tranche of aligned doctoral projects and a clear view of what SIRIUS should deliver. We will use the SIRIUS’ ongoing Geological Assistant project to illustrate how these two elements play together in practice. This project emerged from a series of separate scoping workshops between the cen-tre's academic researchers, a vendor company and an operating company. This project then moved through a process of feasibility assessment with all stakeholders. This process of developing understand-ing and securing corporate commitment has resulted in an innovation project that is now started. Using the feasibility study, the vendor representative and academic project leader worked with the networked organization to mobilize academics resources. This involved both formulating a vision for the innovation, as well as returning to the basic question: "what is in this for you?" The latter is necessary to secure inter-est and committed resources from the academic researchers.