Thesis title:
A lifecycle perspective on megaproject innovation: new forms of contract and interfirm collaboration in the offshore oil and gas industry.
About the project:
Megaprojects play a central role in how we develop the infrastructure for modern urban societies to function well and prosper. To offer better public services and contemplate more users, governments and private operators invest regularly in large-scale, multi-billion megaprojects for the construction of new airports, bridges, tunnels, roads, rail transit systems, nuclear power plants, refineries, seaports, and even entire new cities. Aside from their excessive costs, typically more than US$ 1 billion, megaprojects also take many years from planning to delivery, have numerous stakeholders with power to influence the decision-making process, and the exercise of schedule and synchronization that happens in all projects is taken to a higher order of magnitude. Not surprisingly, the risks of performance and strategic failure are extremely high, and innovation is often discouraged because it is associated with overruns and delays.
Typical megaproject outputs require the integration of knowledge and skill bases that are unavailable within a single organization, thus several innovation actors are needed. Given the multi-firm nature of megaprojects, contracting is an important governance tool to organize the innovation process. Project studies have called attention to the emergence of new delivery models based on interfirm collaboration, by properly allocating risks and responsibilities, incentivizing suppliers, and reducing fragmentation between design and construction. However, megaproject innovation is still a relatively recent field of study, and it remains very much focused on one institutional setting, where conditions have been favorable for promoting innovation. The necessity to cope with uncertainty and complexity is pervasive across all megaproject-based sectors, and it remains important to shed light on how private operators and governments are experimenting with novel contracting strategies in other domains.
My dissertation contributes to this emerging line of research by discussing the relationship between contracting and megaproject innovation in the offshore oil and gas industry. The overarching theme on all three papers is how new contracting mechanisms enable the coordination of complex innovation activities in offshore megaprojects. The findings are based on a three-year research period with 73 engineers and managers in Norway who have a long-term perspective on how to manage megaprojects. The papers are organized according to critical opportunities for innovation in different lifecycle phases of megaprojects. The lifecycle perspective builds on the argument provided by Davies et al. (2014) that opportunities for finding new practices, processes and efficiencies emerge over different phases in a megaproject, and that owners need to develop capabilities to seize the opportunities when they arise.
Supervisor
Helge Ryggvik (UiO)
Commentator
Jonas Söderlund (BI/University of Lund)
About Tércio Filho
Tércio Filho is a PhD Research Fellow at the TIK Centre. This seminar marks the final evaluation prior to submission of his dissertation.
Tércio Filho's manuscript is available upon request from 2 May. Please send the request to Filho at: t.a.p.filho@tik.uio.no .
If you would like to participate via Zoom, please contact Inger-Johanne Ullern: i.j.ullern@tik.uio.no
Welcome!