15/08/2017

Press release: Competitive selection of innovative projects under the “Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge” begins at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology

The competitive selection of innovative projects under the “Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge” has started at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skolkovo). Gazprom Neft is a partner to this event, organised by the Skolkovo Foundation, and will be meeting all business requirements.

The main objective of the competition is to stimulate research and development in new information technologies in those areas of most immediate interest to Russian oil and gas companies. The organisers envisage such areas as including new ways of storing, processing, transferring and displaying information; systems design, development and management; cloud technologies and services; high-performance computing and data storage systems; and audio, video and graphic information retrieval, recognition and processing systems.

The competition is open to innovative Russian small and medium-sized companies, and scientific organisations. On that basis, Gazprom Neft and Skolkovo are focussed on harnessing the potential of small scientific and knowledge-based businesses more efficiently in developing product lines for major companies and in creating new production facilities based around innovative technologies — including unprecedented technologies, unparalleled elsewhere.

As for participants, their success in the competition depends on speeding-up the commercialisation of developments, bringing products to market, and generating sustainable demand for these.

Selections will be made across five nominations:

1. wearable devices for industrial safety;
2. augmented reality technologies for equipment and operational monitoring;
3. 3D navigation at production facilities;
4. infrastructure malfunction forecasting; and
5. automatic processing and contact-routing of email users.

Five grants have been allocated for the five best solutions to the advertised business requirements.

Find out more about competition rules, business requirements and winning selection criteria here.

Konstantin Kravchenko, Head of Gazprom Neft’s IT, Automation and Telecoms Department, commented:

"Digital leadership in the oil and gas industry is one of Gazprom Neft’s strategic objectives. To that end, our company is paying considerable attention to finding, investigating and implementing innovation. We see cooperation with development institutions, partners and the innovative ecosystem as a whole as one way of addressing that problem. Building effective models of cooperation on that basis is an important step in engendering digital transformation at Gazprom Neft.

“The Gazprom Neft Innovation Challenge, being held by the Skolkovo Foundation New Technologies Development and Commercialisation Centre, will help us develop our research and development portfolio in IT. It is very important, moreover, that all projects are directed at addressing practical issues in Gazprom Neft’s business.”

* “Digital transformation” concerns a range of organisational and technical initiatives directed at using modern technologies to dramatically improve productivity, competitiveness and enterprise value.

Version for print