Networking innovation

Partnerships between large companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and universities to create R+D+I ecosystems have become decisive in dealing with increasingly short innovation cycles. Repsol is looking to external talent with programs aimed at the scientific community and is using social networks and idea contests to promote a corporate culture of innovation among its employees.

According to Bernardo del Amo, researcher at the Repsol Technology Center, in an environment of global competition and increasing technological complexity, "searching for talent outside organizations is a must. Instead of a 'closed' innovation model, we want the company's boundaries to be permeable to knowledge from outside collaborators."

The energy company, which already participates in open innovation workshops with corporations in the automobile and industrial equipment manufacturing sectors, is committed to a collaborative model that opens up communication between Spanish companies.

According to the most recent INE (Spanish National Statistics Institute) survey on technological innovation in companies, with data from 2013, 38% of companies that invest in innovation do so by cooperating with suppliers, research centers, universities, and other companies. This trend has been on the rise in recent years "because, faced with more complicated and costly challenges, collaboration where risks and benefits are shared is preferred."

The advantages of open innovation processes include shorter R+D+I project times and "new ideas thanks to intersector and cross-sector approaches." Repsol aims to create a network of trust with high-level collaborators that will achieve "disruptive and ambitious, not incremental developments," in areas such as new energies, information technology, and energy efficiency.

Open innovation
as a work philosophy

Networking inspiration

This strategy features the Repsol Technology Center's Inspîre Program, which is aimed at the scientific community at Spanish universities and R+D+I centers. In an example of public-private collaboration, Repsol launches challenges for researchers to achieve "collaborative, high-risk, high-reward solutions" and finances basic research projects and quick concept tests to accelerate the movement of innovations from the lab to the market.

The Inspîre program's third call for new projects has begun. In its previous editions, the program has focused on fields such as energy storage and nanotechnology applications in the oil and gas industry. In its second edition, from a total of 70 projects, Repsol chose to develop sensors to continuously monitor oil and gas extraction wells and to research new strategies to improve the properties of heavy crude oils. Research on the development of organic flow batteries for electric vehicles is also being financed.

Additionally, the company's energy ventures are "a window to outside knowledge" in areas such as bioenergy, sustainable mobility, and renewable energies "that may become new businesses in the future," states del Amo. Through its venture capital subsidiary, Repsol invests in companies such as Graphenea, a leading Spanish startup on the international scene in the field of graphene production, in partnership with the Spanish Center for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI) (only available in Spanish) to promote this technology.

With the aim of creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem in the field of energy efficiency in Spain, Fundación Repsol has allocated close to €3 million annually to the Entrepreneurs Fund. Since its beginnings in 2011, 21 business projects have been incubated with the generous support of this fund, resulting in 22 patents registered and around €2 million in sales for these startups.

Open Innovation Program: Inspîre

15,000 employees have shared, developed, and voted for the best proposals on Repsol's ideas network

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Taking advantage of internal talent

These open innovation processes "are shown to catalyze internal innovation, encouraging a cultural change," states del Amo. The energy company is promoting a collaborative culture within the company with initiatives such as experience networks; groups made up of professionals from different businesses who share knowledge in areas such as industrial maintenance.

Social ideas networks are another initiative that Repsol is using to encourage participation. In the last three years over 15,000 employees have shared, developed, and voted for the best proposals on the platform ideas4all Innovation Agora (only available in Spanish). Through various challenges launched in an open call for proposals, 3,000 ideas have been submitted for debate and 15 have been implemented in an active listening exercise by the company with its community of employees.

"To adopt a truly innovative culture in organizations, there must be an environment that accepts errors and risks," one of the values promoted in the IN Awards. More than a thousand professionals divided into teams prepared their proposals for this internal ideas competition in 2015. Several committees of experts, with the votes of almost 4,000 employees, selected the winning project, which aims to sustainably ensure the availability of steam in refineries.

The difficulties for this cultural change, according to del Amo, include "the Not invented here (NIH) syndrome, especially when external opportunities compete with internal opportunities. At Repsol this is not a significant handicap thanks to management's support for the process." Furthermore, a team of managers, known as technology scooters, is necessary to facilitate the incorporation of external solutions. In the future, Repsol will aim to extend its ecosystem to clients and suppliers "to achieve more powerful innovation processes."