Abstract
High Price of oil brought new challenges to oil companies regarding the knowledge management and "humanware" policies. Ecopetrol, through the Research Branch of the company (Instituto Colombiano del Petroleo - ICP), designed and accomplished an aggressive and innovative strategy for creating strong relationship with the universities looking forward to assuring the necessary capabilities and human resources in a very competitive industry.
The first step was the definition of the critical knowledge and topics requiredfor the company to guarantee the future growing and a competitive international position. Themes as well stability, seismic processing, enhanced oil recovery, mature fields development, structural geology, stratigraphy, among others, were defined as key knowledge for the oil industry activity and development in Colombia. Cooperation agreements were signed with the universities for organizing research groups which would work with the following structure:
Groups would be composed for undergraduate students from the 4 upper levels (education in undergraduate level in Colombia is structured in 10 periods, six months long each) and postgraduate students, in a sort of pyramidal structure.
The group should have leader researchers from Ecopetrol and the university (at least 1 of each institution).
Young researchers are recently graduated students, with specific responsibilities in research projects and leading groups of undergraduated students
Ecopetrol would give strategic guidelines and sponsor the projects proposed for the group leading the focus of the invested resources
This initiative started back in 2003, with 10 agreements with different universities. After 5 years of successful operation, Ecopetrol invested in 2008 a sum near to US$4 M in 32 cooperation agreements pointing to research projects of the company; 193 undergraduate and 185 postgraduate students are part of the research groups. More than 90 technical solutions have been provided to Ecopetrol and 8 software solutions were designed and currently are in operation in the company.
In addition to these results, the most important success of the program is the people; Ecopetrol have the possibility to select the educated professionals in strategic branches of knowledge that have supplied the company with the necessary human force to face the challenge of becoming and international competitor.
