Canada's oil sands provide a source of crude oil that is expected to place Canada among the top five oil-producing countries in the world by 2020. Because of its importance to Canada's future, the Canadian Academy of Engineering has taken special care in evaluating extraction plans. ProGrid Evaluation Services, founded by Clement Bowman, provided the methodology for their selection process.
And this is just one in a long line of big projects the company has contributed to. “ProGrid helps companies decide how and where to invest their R&D resources; it is challenging to sift through proposals to find those that have the most potential for innovation,” Bowman said. His work on the Canadian oil sands extraction project was a standout success, and earned Bowman the 2008 Global Energy International Prize from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.
Bowman has been researching the Canadian oil sands since 1964, when Imperial Oil selected him to test bitumen extraction methods in Alberta. A decade later, he became the founding chairman of the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority (AOSTRA). In 1986 he became president of the Alberta Research Council, where the oil sands and their environmental issues were a priority.
“At age 60 I set up ProGrid to put my career interests into a consulting practice,” Bowman said. “Reviewers of proposals had a high volume to work with, and the conventional peer review process didn’t work. The sheer volume of applications would bring traditional approaches to their knees.”
Research and development projects are difficult for companies to quantify because the potential benefits are almost always unpredictable. ProGrid's evaluation enables companies to compare intangible assets on both the merits of the innovation and the business potential. It uses Language Ladders, a means of taking human observations and attaching them to a numerical scale. As a result, intangibles can be compared and quantified on a meaningful level. Bowman has provided a description of the principles of ProGrid and various case studies in the book ‘Intangibles.’
Bowman compares ProGrid's evaluation matrix to Edwards Deming's establishment of a 'quality excellence' culture in manufacturing. Deming's sessions, conducted in Japan in the 1950s on quality control and statistical process control, led directly to that country's international reputation for top-quality technological products. “Deming was able to introduce this in Japan long before his ideas were accepted in the United States. But America of course later took Deming’s teachings to a new level,” Bowman explained.
His advice to fellow entrepreneurs is not to give up when problems appear. “Don’t get discouraged; tough times are an opportunity for progress,” Bowman said. At 80, Bowman himself has no intention of retiring any time soon. “I’m just as active now as ever,” he told The Suit. ‘And anyway, I’m too old to take up golf!”
www.progrid.info
We recommend:
What if you tossed an apple into the air, and it never dropped back down? What if, instead, it kept
The Great Eastern Group is the company behind the infrastructure than keeps the whole world connecte
Kohlman Systems Research refuses to crash. The aerospace engineering services company, which provide
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
