Petrobras is 12th among those companies that practice the most open innovation with startups in Brazil and leads the rankings for the Oil and Gas industry. This is taken from the Top 100 Open Corps ranking, which, every year, recognizes and gives awards to those companies that have the most partnerships with startups.

The awards ceremony took place in partnership with the City of Rio de Janeiro and FINEP (Financial Supporter of Studies and Projects). Petrobras was represented by a delegation from the Engineering, Technology and Innovation Department and the Digital Transformation section.

“This award is a recognition of the strategic vision and hard work put into establishing partnerships with startups, driving innovation and supporting the technological transformation of the entire energy industry”, stated Maiza, the executive manager of Petrobras’s Research and Innovation Center (CENPES), highlighting the company’s extensive open innovation program, ‘Connections for Innovation’.

“We have more than 800 ongoing partnerships, and invested more than R$ 4 billion in 2022 alone. Startups are part of these efforts. We already have 73 ongoing projects with such companies. 29 technologies have been validated and 3 successfully implemented. Over R$ 62 million has been invested in these projects to date, which demonstrates our commitment to excellence and innovation. These results show how the energy sector is becoming increasingly significant among startups”, she added.

The award is the result of the investment made: Petrobras has risen, in recent years, from 75th in 2020, to 12th in the overall ranking and has just won the Oil and Gas category, again. The survey looks at the number of open innovation relationships, based on data provided by the companies and startups. Each form of interaction is given a weighting according to the type of relationship.
Last year, in total, corporations in the Oil and Gas industry established 403 business relationships with 251 startups. The most common type of contract was for services or products to be supplied by startups, followed by resources for R&D and prototyping.
“The relationships recorded involved around R$ 265 million of direct transactions, compared to R$ 95 million for the previous year, which represents an increase of 179%. The direct benefit for both sides, and for the industry as a whole, is certainly much greater than that”, explained Bruno Rondani, the CEO and founder of 100 Open Startups.

The 100 Open Startups Ranking has been published since 2016. It has established itself as the largest corporate ranking in Latin America, and an important reference for the market. It is based on objective criteria, the relationships between corporations and startups, and it recognizes and rewards those corporations that lead the way on open innovation with startups, as well as the startups that are attracting the most corporate interest.

For 2023, the publication has reached its eighth edition and recorded record figures for innovation. There were 54,010 open innovation relationships recorded between corporations and startups, totaling over R$ 6.4 billion – an increase of 131% compared to 2023.

Connections

Petrobras’s ‘Connections for Innovation’ Program is part of its objective to encourage innovations that are likely to have an impact or produce efficiency gains in areas of interest to the company. The objective is to accelerate the innovation process by bringing the entire system together: innovative people, Science and Technology Institutions (STIs), universities and companies. It has eight modules in total. Technology Partnerships, Technology Transfer, Ignition, Technology Orders, Open Lab, Residents, Startups (intended for co-creation and accelerating innovations) and Solution Acquisition (for testing and validating solutions). The last two involve agreeing partnerships and acquiring solutions from startups. This has already resulted in more than 50 contracts on developing innovative solutions with Petrobras.