People, Ideas & Objects establish the means for producers to build value from their competitive advantages of their land & asset base, and earth science & engineering capabilities. To be achieved through profitable reserve expansion, production increases or cost reductions. With the Preliminary Specification a second revenue stream is firmly established from the deployment of their science and engineering capabilities to the various Joint Operating Committees they have an interest in. This revenue stream is designed, at a minimum, to offset the full cost of building and maintaining the competitive advantage the producer has in terms of their earth science & engineering capacities and capabilities.

Providing people with the appropriate knowledge and information to act in a fast-changing environment is difficult. Speed will be a critical component of producers' capabilities, deployment and competitive advantage. Currently, some of the difficulty in getting knowledge and information to the right people is a result of ensuring the integrity of the information will not be breached by those not part of the organization, or not the information authorized by the organization. The Security & Access Control module of the Preliminary Specification imposes high levels of integrity on all communications and storage of data and information. Inheriting much of these capabilities from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. However with high levels of collaboration throughout People, Ideas & Objects Preliminary Specification there may be the expectation that these collaborations between firms in the Joint Operating Committee may lead to some perceived leakage of proprietary knowledge losses. People, Ideas & Objects ask if information losses impose any risk to innovative oil & gas producers' competitive advantages of their land & asset base, or earth science & engineering capabilities?

No they do not. In fact, collaborations enhance the firm's innovativeness and capabilities. In a fast moving, innovative industry the last thing a producer needs to be constrained by is a method of operation where they own specific Intellectual Property, and as a result it is the only method of operation the firm pursues. Are the producers and Joint Operating Committees capabilities a fixed point of science or an ability to apply innovations and scientific developments? Do medical Doctors own the Intellectual Property they treat their patients with or use the most advanced treatments available?

The question therefore becomes how is appropriate information and capability deployed as needed? Professor Giovanni Dosi notes that although the free movement of information has occurred in industries for many years, it has never been easily transferable to other companies within those industries. Replicating a competitive advantage from one company to another is not as easy, or even worthwhile. Dosi (1988) goes one step further and states, “even with technology license agreements, they do not stand as an all or nothing substitute for in-house search.” A firm needs to develop “substantial in-house capacity in order to recognize, evaluate, negotiate and finally adapt the technology potentially available from others.” Therefore why not focus on the need to increase the company's own unique and specific competitive advantages based on advanced specializations and divisions of labor in these sciences?

We’ve discussed the firm's operational governance and the Joint Operating Committee. A significant element of this discussion is the capabilities these organizations have access to. Capabilities are documented in the Research & Capabilities and Knowledge & Learning modules of the Preliminary Specification. These are the documentation of the explicit knowledge that the producers capabilities are able to conduct. And to state this more clearly, these are attained through coordination of the market's earth science & engineering capabilities. Therefore, from a governance perspective, these capabilities should be protected and kept for the firm's use only? Nothing could be further from the truth. Usage of these capabilities will leak to outside firms. As part of their capabilities, the firm must prioritize having the right information deployed by the right people at the right time and in the right location. Governance therefore should be more concerned with the appropriate and timely use of these capabilities in terms of generating value, rather than the hoarding and protection of information that will be released in some form nonetheless, may be generally understood throughout the industry and will be the basis of further market innovations and developments in the near future. From Professor Richard Langlois' “Modularity in Technology, Organization, and Society."

This is the basic modularization of the market economy. It accords well with the modularization G. B. Richardson (1972) suggested in offering the concept of economic capabilities. By capabilities Richardson means "knowledge, experience, and skills" (1972, p. 888), a notion related to what Jensen and Meckling (1992) call "specific knowledge" and to what Hayek (1945) called "knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place." p. 27.

If the Joint Operating Committee coordinates these capabilities in the appropriate way, externalities will flow to the producers represented there. That is what operation governance is most concerned about. That there’s leakage of some explicit knowledge of these capabilities during operation is immaterial to the firm's externalities and competitive position. We discussed this during our review of Professor Giovanni Dosi for the Preliminary Specification. His research showed that it took equal and sometimes more effort to copy another firm's capabilities than to generate them. It is therefore more effective for a firm to focus on their key competitive advantages, their land & asset base, and their specialized earth science & engineering capabilities. In a dynamic, innovative and rapidly changing environment a producer firm wants its key competitive advantage to be state of the art and on the cutting edge at all times. Using market offerings to encourage and reward Intellectual Property developers to fully develop their products and services. To do so without fear of the producer community disregarding their property. This will make the service industry and other vendors able to support oil & gas producers and their efforts to generate value. Intellectual Property is not the domain of oil & gas producers in any way. Their value development is a result of the deployment of their tacit knowledge and coordination of the marketplaces resources. And what producers capabilities can do with that knowledge to build value from their oil & gas assets.