Again, this year the Radical Innovation Sprint invited researchers to explore their most radical ideas applicable for the oil and gas industry, for a chance to explore the ideas in a 3-month project. This resulted in 47 ideas, where a committee had to rank the anonymised ideas according to their level of radicalism. Now 14 highly radical ideas are offered funding.
At deadline on 1 May, the Radical Innovation Sprint had received 47 ideas. All 47 ideas were then anonymized before a committee could evaluate and give recommendations. Together they had to find the most radical ideas with the biggest potential.
On 28 May, the committee concluded their task in a workshop where they discussed and ranked the ideas. As a result 14 ideas now get the chance to bring their idea as many steps closer to reality as possible in a 3-month Sprint project.
High creativity among the ideas
The committee confirmed the opinion of the Radical Innovation Team. Namely, that all ideas were impressive with the high quality and creativity.
The specific ideas are not yet official, but they are widely spread out over topics such as subsurface, infrastructure, structures and topside processing, covering novel elements of for example: enhanced oil recovery, corrosion, monitoring, inspection and turning waste into products. Numerous disciplines are included such as geology, microbiology, mechanics, robotics and chemistry.
Across organizations
Quite a few of the ideas collaborates across different organizations. Due to the anonymisation, the committee was oblivious to this. However, all cross-organizational ideas ranked highly among the 47 ideas, suggesting that the collaboration between organizations inspire and facilitate new, radical ideas.
The researchers behind the ideas now being funded come from Aalborg University, Technical University of Denmark, Aarhus University, University of Copenhagen, and from third party institutions. The projects will run from 1 September to 30 November 2018.
Read more about the Radical Innovation Sprint 2018 here.
A radical idea is classified by being high risk - high reward. As such many radical ideas are quite immature and has the risk of meeting showstoppers during their exploitation. Nonetheless, if successful the potential is high.
The committee
This year the Radical Innovation Sprint committee consisted of 14 members all pertaining to one or more of the following groups: Oil and Gas Professionals, Neighbor Industry, Researcher and/or highly Innovative People. Only in the last phase did they know the requested budget of each idea and at no time did the committee know who is behind each idea.