This week’s Pipeliners Podcast episode features David Yoel, Simon Bellemare, and Chris Alexander discussing the process of getting new items to market, the challenges often faced while developing new technologies, and ways large organizations are involved in the operation.

In this episode, you will learn about the Valley of Death and what it means, helpful practices to commercialize new products, and the importance of not giving up.

Product Commercialization Show Notes, Links, and Insider Terms

• Chris Alexander is the President and Founder of ADV Integrity. Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. 
  • ADV Integrity, Inc. is an engineering consulting and business strategy firm primarily focused on serving the pipeline industry.
• David Yoel is the Founder and CEO of American Aerospace Technologies. Connect with Dave on LinkedIn.
  • AATI is a leader in intelligent airborne sensing and surveillance services for energy and other critical infrastructure. We deliver services with conventional aircraft, drones and medium altitude, long endurance unmanned aircraft. AATI has been flying long endurance UAS Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) in the national airspace system since 2010.
• Simon Bellemare is the Founder and CEO of MMT. Connect with Simon on LinkedIn
  • MMT (Massachusetts Materials Technology) From invention to commercial product solutions, MMT was founded in 2014 to develop and commercialize new instrumentation to accurately measure mechanical properties of oil and gas pipelines without having to interrupt service and extract pipe cutouts for laboratory testing. Today, the MMT team brings a broad range of experience to deliver products, training and technical support.
• The Pipeline Research Council International (PRCI) opened its Technology Development Center (TDC) in Houston, Texas in 2015. The facility sits on eight acres and  is a major commitment by the energy pipeline industry to address the key issues that it faces to ensure the safety of the national and international pipeline system. Having a single location able to accumulate former in-service pipe materials with real-world pipeline features/flaws is invaluable to PRCI’s R&D Program and the industry, and provides a central point for hosting industry-sponsored training and workshops.
• Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) are a method for understanding the technical maturity of a technology during its acquisition phase.
• The Commercial Readiness Level (CRL) framework assesses various indicators which influence the commercial and market conditions beyond just the technology maturity. This enables key barriers to be addressed to support the commercialisation of a technology.
• The Valley of Death (VoD) reflects a series of challenges facing technology-based companies during their early development stages.
• The National Science Foundation is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering
• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the United States and surrounding international waters. Its powers include the construction and operation of airports, air traffic management, the certification of personnel and aircraft, and the protection of U.S. assets during the launch or re-entry of commercial space vehicles.
• Beyond the Visual Line Of Sight (BVLOS) refers to the available sight of a pilot flying an aircraft.
• An unmanned aircraft system (UAS)  is an unmanned aircraft and the equipment necessary for the safe and efficient operation of that aircraft
• API (American Petroleum Institute) represents all segments of America’s natural gas and oil industry. API has developed more than 700 standards to enhance operational and environmental safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
• PHMSA (Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration) is the federal agency within USDOT responsible for providing pipeline safety oversight through regulatory rulemaking, NTSB recommendations, and other important functions to protect people and the environment through the safe transportation of energy and other hazardous materials.
• R&D stands for research and development
• The PRCI (Pipeline Research Council International) is the preeminent global collaborative research development organization of, by, and for the energy pipeline industry.
• ILI (In-line Inspection) is a method to assess the integrity and condition of a pipeline by determining the existence of corrosion, cracks, deformations, or other structural issues that could cause a leak.
• Integrity Management (IM) (Pipeline Integrity Management) is a systematic approach to operate and manage pipelines in a safe manner that complies with PHMSA regulations.
• Intelligent Pipeline Integrity Program (iPIPE) members collaborate on dynamic innovations to quickly gain hands-on experience and advance the most promising technologies impacting pipeline safety.
• Return on investment (ROI) or return on costs is a ratio between net income and investment. 

Product Commercialization Full Episode Transcript

288: API Tech Day Round Table David Yoel, American Aerospace Technology, Inc.; Simon Bellemare, MMT, with RT and Chris Alexander

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” Episode 288, sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, driving safety, environmental protection, and sustainability across the natural gas and oil industry through world class standards and safety programs.

Since its formation as a standard setting organization in 1919, API has developed more than 800 standards to enhance industry operations worldwide. Find out more about API at API.org.

Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, Bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now, your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show that appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Danny King with Eastman Chemical. Congratulations, Danny. Your YETI is on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week, we spoke to Chris Alexander with ADV Integrity, David Yoel with American Aerospace Technologies, and Simon Bellemare with MMT about commercializing technology. This is a sit down interview that we did at the API Demo Day at the Pipeline Research Council’s Technology Development Center in Houston, Texas.

Russel: We are here at the API Pipeline Technology Demo Day at the Pipeline Research Council. Man, that is a whole lot of…

Chris Alexander: That’s pretty impressive. 

Russel: I have one more TLA, that would be at the Technology Development Center.

Anyway, we’ve been talking as we’re walking around and looking at all this new tech about commercialization and how do you take creative, innovative, new ideas, unprecedented ideas, ideas that have the opportunity to make a step change improvement in safety performance. How do you actually get those to market?

I want to do just a quick introduction of myself. Many people probably know me, but I’ll do that anyways. I’m Russel Treat. I’m President, CEO of EnerACT Energy Services.

We have a family of companies that have various software products that we use in the pipeline space for control room management, process safety management, and field operations management. I’ve been doing commercialization and software for 30 years.

Chris: Long time.

Russel: Long time, and also a host of the Pipeliners Podcast. You should listen.

As all of these gentlemen do. Chris, would you do the same thing? Gives us a quick introduction about who you are and your background.

Chris Alexander: My name is Chris Alexander. I’m President and Founder of ADV Integrity, which is an engineering consulting company in the Houston area. What makes us a little unique, we blow stuff up. We do full scale testing. We also do failure analysis and numerical modeling.

What’s really fun for me, which is why I’m on the podcast with you all, is that we evaluate a lot of technologies. Last year, we looked at about 50 different technology companies. I have a vested interest in seeing technologies evolve, but we’re also involved in the process of helping them do that.

Russel: You guys also have a maturity model for technology commercialization too…

Chris: We do.

Russel: …which is really interesting because it’s from some research and adapted specifically by you.

Chris: We talk about technology readiness levels, but we’re going to talk about commercial readiness index, the CRI. That’ll be part of our conversation today.

Russel: Great. Dave?

David Yoel: My name’s Dave Yoel. I’m Founder and CEO of American Aerospace Technologies. We have three products. The AiRanger unmanned aircraft system. It’s a beyond visual line of sight unmanned aircraft that can fly 750 miles on pipeline patrol.

We have the InstaMaps automated threat detection system, a sensor package for pipeline patrol, and the OSCAR oil spill sensor, which is just coming on the market to automatically detect liquid hydrocarbon releases, both onshore and offshore.

Russel: Simon?

Simon Bellemare: I’m Simon Bellemare, Founder, CEO of MMT. We’re a technology company. We were the first to commercialize material verification.

This is the strength and the toughness of the pipeline when you are able to access it at an excavation site, but you can’t shut it down to get a cut out. We essentially develop technology to measure those strength properties without having to cut the pipe.

Russel: That’s pretty unprecedented. That’s unprecedented technology. Dave, some of the technology you have is unprecedented, correct?

Dave: Indeed.

Russel: Simon, where would you say you are in the lifecycle of getting your product commercially to the market?

Simon: Well, I know I’m going to get a full rating at the end of this. I’m just like you.

 I will start by saying that we made our first service sales seven years ago. We’re not going under this year. We passed that seven year mark.

Some operators, which are very important, and customers are the operators, one of them said, when I said we’ve been five years in business, he said, “That’s great because at that point, chances that you’ll go away are significantly reduced already.”

Russel: Just like everything doubles every seven years if you’re investing at seven percent, everything halves every seven years, for technology guys.

Simon: In terms of penetration, we were targeting having our tool used 8,000 times a year for different locations, so different excavation sites, and we have 1,500 this year. We still have some ways to go. We’re going to do like you, product enhancements to get there, but that’s still the target.

Russel: Dave, same question for you. Where are you guys in the life cycle?

Dave: We’re in what is technically known as the valley of death.

Russel: Who has been there?

David: We’ve all been there. We have what we believe to be minimum viable products, both on our unmanned aircraft and our two sensor systems. We’re working them into routine operations, starting with pilot projects and moving toward routine operations. We haven’t fully launched into routine operations with any of our products quite yet.

Russel: The definition of the valley of death for people that might be listening to this and not heard that term before.

What’s the valley of death there, Chris?

Chris: I think sometimes it depends on what context you’re looking at. Basically, you’ve gotten all the technology things done, and then your challenge with, because you’re an uphill climb, getting companies to buy in it using the technology.

Once since you’ve done all the TRL stuff, but are people buying into the using the technology? A lot of companies never come out of that valley of death. They just stay there.

Simon: I want to supplement that. National Science Foundation – I try to promote that here with technology that you’re evaluating – is a huge source of funding to get you to the valley of death.

Male Participant: That’s just what I was thinking.

Simon: They tell you a little bit how to go about getting there, and it’s customer creation. By the time you create a recurring customer is where you can crawl out of this.

Russel: What happens for a lot of entrepreneurs that are trying to bring a new technology like this to market is, they think that once they’re to the point that they’re entering the valley of the death, they’re done, and really, that’s where you start at.

Chris: Four years of wandering.

Russel: The other thing is, the whole nature of what you need in your company in terms of capability shifts, because up until that point, it’s all about engineering, R&D, understanding the customer, understanding the problem, understanding the solution, and so on and so forth. Then at that point, now it’s about business development and marketing.

Chris: You’ve got to use the other side of your brain. 

Russel: There’s two sides to your brain? Who knew?

Chris: Only at the other side of the valley of death.

Russel: Chris.

Chris: Yeah.

Russel: Where do you think these guys are in terms of their commercialization journey?

Chris: That’s great, I get to answer.

David: That’s so you don’t ask me. [laughs]

Chris: I know Simon very well, and we’ve worked together for a long time. I mentioned in 2016 at IPC, I remember going over to your booth. I think from my observation, their TRL is very solid, but it’s the adoption part that’s a challenge.

You said you’re at 1,500 out of 8,000, and probably you would prefer to be closer to 4,000 at this point. We’re almost halfway through the year. I think it’s the skeptics in industry, which is one of the themes here. I know a little bit about drones and really do the aerial, but it’s the regulations have got to give you some latitude.

Part of the TRL, the technology readiness level and the commercial readiness index, there’s also a regulatory acceptance. We got this really cool little graphics that I’ve written about, and for you, that’s a really big deal. You’ve actually got regulations working for you. On your side, the regulations present a challenge.

Russel: Because of the FAA flight regulations around unmanned aircraft.

Dave: Also, there’s no regulations against digitally transforming aerial patrol using sensors instead of eyeballs from an airplane to detect and report threats, but there’s also no industry standards around how you digitally transform aerial patrol. Yes, we have the FAA challenges and they’re infamous, but they’re really working hard.

Now focused on BVLOS, beyond visual line of sight, UAS, and working very hard to enable that, but there’s also, for us, a question on how you transform at the regulatory level, what’s required there to allow adoption of digital aerial patrol.

Simon: I’m going to play the card here, generalizing that a little bit where…We’ve talked about this early that this is disruptive or different technology here that requires some adjustment to how people do things, and they’re also going to be getting different data. Chances are, they didn’t used to pay for this. There’s a number of challenges there.

I would say that regardless of the details, there is a curve, and that’s Steve Blank. I think I shared that with you where it’s got to take five, six years before you can actually say that you’re finally becoming truly commercial. The smarter you are about what those challenges are, the more you’re going to be able to spend the time at the right place.

That’s a huge effort because most of the time, people that are willing to try, never did it before. This is something I’m willing to contribute as far as what it is to be in the founders’ shoes. It’s incredible, and I’m glad we can get in here because I’m shy to mention it with enough clarity to potential startup founders because it’s discouraging.

Chris: It’s just being pretty honest there.

Russel: Being a founder and taking new technology to market, it’s a weird combination of pessimism and optimism. When I first got married, this would drive my wife crazy because she didn’t know if she was meeting with Friday Russel or Monday Russel.

On Fridays, it was the end of the week, and I’m always reflecting on all the opportunities that were queued up and the things that we accomplished. On Sundays, I go through the numbers and on Mondays, I meet with my team and I’m like, “Here’s where we are with the numbers.”

One of the things you have to learn to do is, you have to manage through different contexts. Once you realize that that’s just the process, I don’t know that it gets easier, but it’s not as stressful.

Now, you actually know, and really, that’s one of the things that we were talking about, and one of the reasons that Mark Piazza with API wanted us to have this conversation is, there really is a process here.

You need to have full knowledge of what the process is. You’ve got raw development, proof of concept, the valley of death, which is early adoption, and then you’ve got institutionalization, and then you have commercialization.

Where a lot of people stumble is the institutionalization step because they don’t understand what that means. I want to tier this up as a question because I like to get you guys’ perspective on it. You hear this conversation, “PHMSA should tell people to do this, API should approve this.” That’s not their role. Would y’all respond to that?

Chris: I’ll answer a little bit, then I want to hear from the guys who are actually having to go through this. One of the keys is to get champions within the operators. You have someone who’s innovative, but our industry has got to reward and not vilify folks.

When you take new technology, sometimes it’s not going to work the way that you want. As an engineer, if you’re hesitant…

Russel: That never happens to me. Does that ever happen to you?

Chris: …to really advance a technology and within your organization, you’re demoted if a technology didn’t work, you need a more entrepreneurial mindset outside the pipeline companies.

In some companies you see that, which I think is great, and those are the companies you’re able to build business with. We need more of that. That’s a mindset that we need to have more of in the industry.

Russel: That’s an interesting observation, Chris. I might frame that a little differently.

I have a lot of direct experience with this. In the big companies, generally they have an R&D group whose charter is to test and understand how to implement and adopt new things.

Chris: You’re getting a good look from Simon.

Russel: Simon, would you like to say something about that?

Dave: You learned something new. What do you…?

Simon: Not all companies use it in the same way. Not at all. Unfortunately, some try to use it as a competitive advantage, and this is related to pipelines. Pipeline has to be a collaboration because everybody gets hurt when something bad happens.

There is that understanding within API, within PRCI. The challenge for some of those individual organizations is to say, “PRCI is going to take care of this, API is going to take care of this.” Chris and I had not talked before going live here, and it’s the exact same thing.

The biggest issue is when a company does not assign a true champion, somebody that believes in the potential of what you’re doing, that can navigate the organization for you, and not risk their career or their progression in that organization as a result of doing that.

Maybe there’s a handful of organizations that help us get there, that did that, are the reason we’re still alive. Forget about, all due respect, all those trade organizations. It’s a handful of individual customers that had figured out that recipe of empowering actual engineers to work with technology companies. That’s the reason we’re here.

Russel: It’s the companies that actually build muscle and capability around innovation. One of the things they have to do to be successful is, they actually need to isolate that from operations because you don’t want to do innovation and operations. You want to do management of change and operations, but you’ve got to build muscle and capability.

You need to do some projects that fail, and you need to capture the learning and push the learning into the organization to inform what’s next. That’s a big challenge because we don’t do that well in our business, I would assert.

Dave: I think you hit something on the head, Russell, just a moment ago when you said these companies have R&D departments. What’s missing is that transition into operations.

That’s where we are right now with our sensors in particular, is the operations folk say, “R&D is nice, but I don’t want have to change what I do because I already am doing three jobs at once today or maybe 10. To add this change to my processes, somebody’s got to show me how it’s going to work in my life, in my role in this task.” That’s where I’m seeing the gap.

Russel: I agree with that. Again, just to put some context around it, if you take and look at manufacturing science, process management science, the manufacturing world, they have a manufacturing line, and that line runs at 95 to 98 percent efficiency.

The management of that line is to keep it there or a quarter of a percent better, different than the people that are doing new product development that are coming up with a new way to manufacture, and they’re getting it to 80 percent.

Then there’s that, “What do you do to get that 80 percent line into a factory floor and up to 90 percent?” Those guys. That’s the part, that’s the gap that we don’t have in our business. Anybody else want to comment on that?

Dave: I think so. I do think it’s a culture. We’ve been doing this for about 30 years, but some pipeline companies tend to be a little bit more innovative and they will lead the herd in a sense. PRCI provides a great platform for those companies to shine.

I like what API is doing having these events. You need people who think at another level. I love what John F. Kennedy said. He said, “We need men who can dream of things that never were.” That’s about what you’ve done, but you just need a partner to basically go along with you.

Russel: I want to shift our conversation a little bit because a lot of what we’re talking about, to Simon’s point, could be discouraging for somebody who’s getting off onto this journey.

Simon: I want to just clarify one thing about champion.

Russel: Sure.

Simon: This is why it’s a panel. I would not say that the champion needs to be for more of an R&D side of things. That, in my experience, is why, in certain cases, it really works because the person had the knowledge and influence in all the ways through operations to get things done.

Now, they were provided some form of account for spending time on this and having certain expenses and having a budget. Again, it doesn’t mean that it’s done by R&D and turned over for operations.

This is where I’ve seen it the most successful, when the champion, not to say the person that run the initiative, but the champion says, “Hey, guys, I would like you to work with this company and see if we can get them to the point of validation and field trials.”

Russel: It’s generally somebody in an organization that’s trying to solve a problem. They have a charter in the organization to solve that problem, or they have the kind of relationships and purposefulness in how they approach their career to solve a problem.

They’re trying to solve a problem, and they see this as a potential opportunity to solve that problem. That is the point of real engagement, right?

Simon: Mm hmm.

Russel: I’d like to shift a little bit, if we could, and talk about what are some encouraging words and maybe what are some practices that are helpful to people that are trying to commercialize product, because it can be discouraging and it can be wearying.

What I would say is one of the things I’ve heard many times in my life I believe to be true, you can’t get much of anything to be done in a year, but you can change the world in five. One of the disciplines you have to build is you have to be slightly unrealistically optimistic because that’s what keeps you going.

You need to build a practice of looking backwards and acknowledging the grounds you’ve covered. It’s very easy to see the ground remaining to be covered and not acknowledge the ground you have covered. I think you’ve got to celebrate the minor victories. The minor victories are the first day the product works.

We all remember that day when I said, “Holy crap, we have something. It might be real.” The first customer that buys into and implements it. The first customer that tells one of your other customers or potential customers, “Hey, this is really good.”

We just had a dinner at the API Pipeline Conference. I was listening to one of my customers talk to another potential customer and, pardon my language, but sell the crap out of our product. I’m just like, “This is pretty cool. I’m imprinting this into my memory. We’re keeping that right there because five years ago, that wasn’t even a possibility.”

You need to celebrate the minor victories and look backwards and do that. It’s really easy to miss it. Anybody else? What would you say as encouragement for those that are embarking on this journey?

Dave: It is a long road and you have to be stubborn as a bull. You just got to keep driving forward and believe in your product. You have to have a product worth believing in. You’re the test of that, if you’re the entrepreneur.

One of the things I found that I would advise, my two cents, is when you have the opportunity to talk to a champion, let him talk. Don’t tell him about your product. Don’t go on for five minutes about the technology or how it works. Let him talk. Find out what his problems are, or her problems are, and listen.

Take advantage of those unique opportunities to get deeper insight into what problems they need addressed versus what you envisioned when you created the product or the problem you were trying to solve.

Russel: I had one of my mentors, he used to tell me, “Russel, sellin’ ain’t tellin’. Askin’ is.” The other thing I would say about that as I’ve matured is, listening and asking is being a proper engineer because what we’re doing is we’re trying to get problem definition.

We’re trying to get a full problem definition. That requires a lot of listening. You’ll find a lot of joy in that if you’ll do it because those guys know more than you do.

Davet: If I could just add one thing to that, the R&D guy that may have helped you get there, he’s not an operations guy. You’re approaching the operations guy with your R&D guy’s approximation of what he needs. Then, listen to the operations guy who’s going to actually use it to find out more granularly what it is the problem he needs solved.

Simon: I want to build up a little bit on two things here. The first one, when you mentioned being persistent per server and being able to capture opportunities. It’s somehow you have to keep that vision. If you can somehow keep your vision healthy, keep the eye on the ball, that’s when you see those opportunities, and that’s what keeps you going.

I think, again, it’s more in terms of evaluating risk and opportunities to still see what is it going to go to. Something that you said that I thought was interesting also is, along that way for me, it is being nimble.

It’s an overused term probably, but what that means for me is, you got to try. Worst thing that’s going to happen is they’ll say no. That’s probably the best advice I had at the time in ’16. It can frustrate a few folks, they probably won’t be your customer anyway.

Your reputation can go on for years. At the end of the day, if you don’t ask, if you don’t try, and if you can’t find a way to select where you’re going to be spending your limited time and resources, it won’t happen. It’s go and go and go.

I used to say, just don’t look. Try to go in a straight line. It’s OK if you get a little bit and you get scratched a little bit on the guardrail, because that’s how you’re not going to hit the wall. You’re going enough…

Russel: You have to be super persistent and committed to the vision, and infinitely flexible about the means to get there. That, again, it’s a contradiction, right?

Chris: Relentless.

Russel: Relentless, yes.

Christ: Relentless pursuit, right?

Russel: Relentless pursuit, yeah.

Chris: I think there’s a couple other things. I think one is, we’ve all been through this, the frustrations, the great Fridays, the “Oh, my gosh, Mondays,” those things, and rebuilding it. There’s a couple of soft things that they never teach us in engineering school.

One is about relationships. That when you’re down, and I think we’ve all been there, I’ve got a handful of people I can call them on and they just cheer me up. We might talk about work, we might talk about football or something, but it’s just somebody that makes you feel good. The ideal thing is if they’re in your industry.

Then the other thing is, as an entrepreneur, to really listen to what people need, pain motivated change. If there’s something, I know specifically with you, the industry really needs your technology. There’s a great pain if your technology doesn’t work. What happens is, it’s not clients or customers, it’s partners who are working with you. To me, it’s part of that ecosystem.

Then the last thing is, you got to learn how to market. You went to A&M, I got all these degrees from A&M, I never had a marketing class. To build a business, you’ve got to be able to communicate and market. There’s a handful of technology companies, they just don’t do a good job on that.

Russel: We as an industry don’t do a particularly good job on that.

Christ: Messaging, we talked about that all the time.

Russel: One of the whole reasons I did the Pipeliners Podcast is, I would open up the “Pipeline & Gas Journal” and read these articles, particularly on in line inspection and integrity management, and they had all this jargon and buzzwords. I’d read this thing and I’m like, “I don’t know what this says”.

Getting your head around the language is challenging, much less figuring out how to message it effectively. We’re talking to engineers. It’s challenging, but that can also be fun because when you get it right, it just works.

Chris: You know it. You know it’s right.

Russel: It just works. Again, I want to shift a little bit. We’re going to wrap up after this conversation. What can organizations like PRCI and API, and PHMSA be doing to help guys like yourself get your product over the finish line?

Simon: I think the events like we had today and the one we had in Washington, D.C. go a long way in as far as developing and understanding the greater context. We talk about marketing here. There’s a big aspect of just what I would call a business development relationship, understanding what’s happening and what is not happening.

That piece of engagement again, varies a lot by company. I can come up with a long number of good stories, but it is more individual organization. That’s why here, the message for API, I think API is doing their job.

I think we can continue events like today, so individual members understand that they have a role to play. Nothing happens without that strong collaboration. I think that understanding that it has to be a collaboration, it’s not transactional.

It’s built step by step, ideally, with a small group of people because the more people are around, the more the conversation should be around standard and advocacy. Whereas here, we’re talking about working hand in hand, and that can only be so many people at the time.

There may be task groups. If API would have a task group saying, “We are going to support companies just like yours.” Now, I turn it over to you here with the challenge that they have, but it becomes focused, and it could be just a handful of companies that say, “This would have implications for me.

“Together, we want to support this” more than put you to the bench and say, “Are you good? Are you as good as you say you are?” 

Male Participant: It’s a TRL form.

Simon: It’s an important piece, and it’s a bit of a traditional role for PRCI, but in commercialization, again, it’s a task force concept, might be something to consider.

Dave: It’s an intriguing idea. I just learned about the CR…

Chris: RI, commercial readiness index.

Dave: Commercial readiness index. One very simple tactical thing that might then come as a benefit – I’m saying this having been done PRCI research projects – is if there was some evaluation by the members or the technical review committee of a research project to give it a CRI rating, and to try to put some flesh on that so the R&D folks and the people that are investing in it through the membership have a general sense of where along that road the technology is.

I learned about CRI today, so I can’t wait to learn more.

Russel: I think that one of the things we could do is, companies have to…I have to build a little context. There’s a couple of challenges. First, we have to realize that API, PHMSA, PRCI don’t approve things, they facilitate things. That’s number one. They provide data and analytical basis for decision making. That’s first thing we have to realize.

Second thing we have to realize is that competitors are going to have to compete. We’re not going to get a leg up from our competition in the marketplace, we’re going to have to compete. That’s the first thing you have to realize, is context.

However, that being said, I think one of the things we can do is look at, what about doing some joint projects or some PRCI projects that are on the back end of the valley of death and focus more on commercialization?

There’s an organization called iPIPE in North Dakota that does this really well. They’re funded by the state and they’re backed by a university. They apply the R&D and development process, but to the later stage.

They’re not doing original research. What they’re trying to do is look for things that are out there, where if we invest in that, we can get it across the finish line, or we can understand how to apply and practice and what benefit it’s really going to give us. I think we need more of those kinds of projects.

Having what vendors would qualify to participate and how that works, and there’s probably some research that needs there, but I think that would be something that would really help accelerate the overall process.

Chris: I think something you opened up with is, what is success? What does good look like? The problem is, if you view success as the technology works, that’s not it. If you own a company, success is we’re generating profit, we can reinvest and do more research.

Probably we need to change our mindset and define success as not getting to the one yard line. Success is getting the ball across the goal line.

Russel: Success is having a meaningful safety performance impact in pipeline.

Chris: If you go out of business, you can’t do that.

Russel: That’s right. That’s right.

Chris: I read that in a book somewhere.

Russel: Just because you build better tech doesn’t mean you’re going to actually accomplish that because to get there, it has to work within the company’s operating plans and procedures, within their budgets. It’s got to have a real performance.

Chris: And return on investment, ROI.

Russel: Exactly. We are a capitalist society last time I checked.

Simon: I think there’s good news here, especially at least on the side of PRCI. Cliff Johnson had identified this piece of what I would call implementation.

It’s validated implementation as a gap. The question is, who’s going to do it? That’s an open question for the decision makers here. I go back to the task force just because again, it’s got to be a handful of operators, not 20.

Russel: I want to say, gentlemen, thank you for the conversation. I could talk about this all day long, and if we get a few bourbons in me, we’ll get some really good war stories about…By the way, you know what experience is? That’s what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

Chris: Wow. Man, I’m stealing that.

Russel: Cool. You know what wisdom is? That’s learning the correct lesson from the experience.

With that, we’ll say good night.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Pipeliners Podcast and our conversation with Chris, David and Simon. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit PipelinePodcastNetwork.com/Win and enter yourself in the drawing.

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Transcription by CastingWords