40 JPT • OCTOBER 2016

Accelerating the Uptake Cycle Through Collaboration, Outsourcing

Trent Jacobs, JPT Senior Technology Writer

As a newcomer in

the arena of oilfield

market research, Houston-

based Darcy Partners has

set an ambitiously high

bar for itself: to speed up

the oil and gas industry’s

widely acknowledged

and painfully slow rate of

technology adoption.

Founded in 2015, Darcy is trying to accomplish this by melding its in-depth research studies with a collabor-ative approach to consulting. The lat-ter part of this strategy involves placing a group of promising young compa-nies and their potential suitors into the same room where the free flow of ideas is encouraged.

The firm’s ultimate goal is to prove to oil and gas companies that technology validation becomes a much faster process when done collectively and openly com-pared with when it is all done internally.

“We are saying let’s do innovation more efficiently,” said Hossein Rokhsari,

a partner at Darcy, adding, “which means outsourcing elements of the work that is required for technology development to a group like us, where we do the research, scouting, screening, and evaluation.”

The culmination of all that ground-work is quarterly technology forums that Darcy hosts and moderates. The compa-ny has held two of these day-long events this year: one on advanced data analyt-ics and another on new water manage-ment technologies for unconventional developments. Its upcoming forums will focus on unmanned aerial vehicles, com-pletion optimization, cyber security, and another on advanced data analytics.

A new look at the innovation cycle proposes operators identify a challenge and then hand off many of the subsequent vetting duties to an outside firm before deploying the technology in a test environment. Source: Darcy

Identify internal business opportunities that need technological solutions

Research the technology space to understand trends, established vendors and innovation opportunities

Scout for new vendors, startups,or R&D efforts in the ecosystemthat address the business opportunity

Validate technology solutionthrough due diligence and peer network

Deploy de-risked externaltechnology solutioninternally with pilotsand at enterprise scale

Identify

Research

Scout Validate

Deploy

JPT • OCTOBER 2016

In attendance are key decision makers from oil and gas com-panies whose biggest pain points are used to steer the direc-tion of the forum. Presenting are the entrepreneurs that Darcy has high-graded based on their ability to cure those issues.

For the up-and-coming technology vendors, the forums are a chance to get invaluable face time with their target audience. Darcy takes a hands-on role with those entrepreneurs by pro-viding them with corporate coaching to make their message as effective as possible. Once the pitch is made, operators have the opportunity to put questions to the entrepreneurs about the feasibility of their innovations.

Another of the firm’s partners, Jeremy Sweek, emphasized that this sort of transparency is rare in the oil field but nec-essary to address the fact that the industry has a tendency to run too many pilot tests in isolation. He explained that when operators test-drive startups, the results are typically not shared publicly but end up percolating through word-of-mouth between professional colleagues and field workers.

This practice of informal information sharing is less than desirable from a startup’s point of view because it makes it hard for the company to appear on another operator’s radar screen and grow its business. According to Sweek, it also means disinformation about those startups often goes unchecked and leaves operators in a position where they are unable to fully leverage the sum of their aggregate experience.

“Most of the operators we have talked to have tried a pilot with one, two, or three of these companies but it is a different combination for each of them,” he said. “So why as an industry do we need 100 pilot projects to determine that there is a clear winner, or two or three winners?”

Another problem Darcy is trying to address with its approach is vendor deluge. Using data analytics as an exam-ple, in this space alone there are hundreds of companies try-ing to break into the oil and gas business. Darcy has nar-rowed the list for its clients by distinguishing the startups selling what Sweek referred to as “fluff ” vs. those selling actual breakthroughs that can lower operating costs or en- hance reserves.

“When you say big data, we ask what do you really mean, and when you say analytics, what do you really mean,” he said. “You have to pull it back to see whether or not it’s really just a business intelligence tool that has a different user interface.”

Rokhsari, who worked at an energy-focused venture capi-tal firm before starting Darcy, insists that the point of all this is not only to encourage operators to become investors in the startups—it is to also encourage them to consider becoming paying customers.

The initial results of Darcy’s research efforts and technol-ogy forums appear to be positive. The company reports that every operator has discovered at least two or three startups that they plan to work with, and in turn, each startup has walked away from the forums with three to five operators as potential clients. JPT

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