Gazprom Neft and Skolkovo select the winning projects in this year’s “Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge” contest
The winners of the five nominations in this year’s “Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge”, held by the company in conjunction with the Skolkovo Foundation, and running from August through October 2017, have now been selected.
Under nominations for “Wearable Industrial Safety Devices” the expert jury selected the three strongest teams — consortiums HUMAN+ and Navigine, and IBM and UralTexis, together with CROC — with whom they will continue working on a holistic solution most closely aligned to business needs. The winner in the “Augmented Reality Technologies for Equipment and Operational Monitoring” category was Cyberlit. A project by Compulink was chosen by the jury in the nomination for “3D Navigation at Production Facilities”, with Naumen named best under two nominations: “Infrastructure Malfunction Forecasting” and “Automatic Processing and Contact-routing of Email Users.”
The competition is the latest project under a strategic cooperation agreement signed between Gazprom Neft and the Skolkovo Foundation in 2015. Its objective is to stimulate research and developments in new technologies in those areas of IT of most immediate interest to Russian oil and gas companies. Organisers have taken new approaches to storing, processing, transferring and displaying information; design, development and management systems; cloud technologies and services; high-performance computational and data-storage systems; and search, recognition and processing systems for audio, video and graphic information.
The competition was open to Russian small and medium-sized innovation companies, and research and development organisations. On which basis, Gazprom Neft, together with Skolkovo, is striving to utilise the potential of knowledge-based small business more effectively in developing product lines for major companies and in creating new products based on innovative technologies, including those without competitors or precedent.
Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov commented: “The search for new technological solutions, allowing us to find answers to today’s business challenges and delivering the level of efficiency essential in today’s economic environment — is one of the most important objectives in Gazprom Neft’s development. The business’s digital transformation occupies a particular place in this process, the tools for which we hope to find through our strategic partnership with the Skolkovo Foundation. The outcomes of the ‘Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge’ competition have confirmed that Russia’s knowledge-based small business sector holds opportunities that go beyond solving practical tasks — it is precisely here that the capacity for innovation that can give a new impetus to the development of the oil and gas industry is being laid down today.”
Igor Drozdov, Chairman of the Skolkovo Foundation, added: “The technological competitions we have organised together with our industrial partners have proved themselves as an effective tool for supporting innovation in Russia. They allow us to focus developments on addressing genuine and current production challenges, insofar as the conditions of these competitions are set by the leading market players, major industry drivers. Gazprom Neft specialists’ high qualifications means we can conduct expert project appraisals at the highest level, identify the potential of each of these, and make professional recommendations to competition participants. We hope that those developments the jury have identified as the best will benefit Gazprom Neft as well as our economy, as a whole.”
Tags: IT, technology, innovation, production technology, refining technology