Technology advances cannot happen without innovation. And innovation happens more rapidly when more resources can be brought to bear.

At the GE Oil & Gas annual meeting in Florence, Italy, a few weeks ago, Claudi Santiago, company president and CEO, talked about the value of innovation and collaboration, particularily in a world that is struggling to recover from a global recession.

“The fact that we need to innovate is paramount,” Santiago said, “and to truly create value, there has to be collaboration. It is absolutely critical.” Partnering will be particularly essential in the coming years as the industry works to develop equipment that is more ecologically sound and to extend equipment life. “We will continue to innovate and deploy more and more technology that is eco-friendly,” he said.

Those new technologies will include more monitoring equipment. And in the wake of the Macondo incident, they also will include sensors for BOPs. “We are extending these capabilities to the subsea segment of the industry,” Santiago said. “We want to put more software and more control in place.”

The company invested US $200 million in plants and equipment in 2010 and increased R&D spending by 10%. GE also deployed more than 700 more resources in key regions. The objective in moving more resources into more places around the world is to get closer to the customer, according to Sam Aquillano, vice president – drilling and production for GE Oil & Gas. “Co-location allows technology transfer

even quicker,” he said.

GE also has established new partnerships in China, India, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Russia.

As national oil companies (NOCs) pursue efficiencies in operation, partnering becomes more and more significant, and this fact is not lost on the NOCs.

Ahmad A. Al-Sa’adi, vice president of gas operations for Saudi Aramco, explained at the annual meeting that collaboration has become standard operating procedure for Saudi Aramco.

“Saudi Aramco is known to be the oil giant of the world,” Al-Sa’adi said, but he noted that oil is not the company’s only focus. According to Al-Sa’adi, the country’s gas production is expected to grow by 30% in the next 10 years. Producing gas reserves efficiently will require new technologies, and Saudi Aramco intends to develop those technologies in cooperation with companies like GE.

Some of the more practical goals of this collaboration, he said, are to work toward meeting the demand for spare parts with local manufacturing, to allow access to a large local young workforce, and to support new ventures with logistical and technical assistance as well as workforce development.

“The world needs more energy – as much as 20 MMboe/d in the next 10 years,” Santiago said. Finding and developing reserves on that scale is a daunting proposition. For that ambitious goal to be achieved, he said, companies will have to begin “incubating the future together.”