Governance and Co-ordination of Distributed Innovation Processes: Patterns of R&D Co-operation in the Upstream Petroleum Industry

Increasingly we see limits to the reach of the individual firm over the breadth of technologies and capabilities needed to innovate. Instead such innovation processes are distributed across a variety of actors. The distribution of innovation processes across organisations calls for specific forms of governance structure which extend across thee boundaries of the firm, such as loosely coupled innovative networks. Technological and market drivers determine the location of agents within such networks, reflecting needs and capabilities to co-ordinate systemic knowledge advancements and power dependencies. The paper discusses the theoretical perspectives on the technological and market dimensions involved in the co-ordination of distributed innovative activities, proposing an interpretative framework for the investigation of R&D co-operative settings. Exploring these topics through the lens of the upstream petroleum industry, we investigate the relationship between competitive domains, technological profiles and positioning within R&D networks, arguing that technological and market power features contribute differently to the evolution of co-ordinating (nexus) functions over the system evolution