A Science and Education Platform for Intellectual Support of Breakthrough Teams in the Energy Sector

Making a breakthrough in the energy industry is a particularly laborious cross-disciplinary challenge due to the extreme complexity of production systems and the necessity to ensure the compatibility of a huge number of technologies and industrial and managerial systems of various nature. This makes it highly relevant to provide knowledge-intensive support for teams that implement projects aimed at breakthrough transformations. This article describes a specialized science and education platform that is being rolled out by the authors at a number of major energy companies in Russia and at Ural Federal University. The platform has features of a communications platform that brings together science, education, and energy companies, and of a digital ecosystem that serves as a framework for customized services for stakeholders. The platform uses an operation mechanism that is designed to ensure the reproduction of knowledge that is in line with corresponding trends and changes emerging in the global, national, and industrial contexts, and promptly converts it into learning content and a project agenda for breakthrough teams. An original methodology for the training of breakthrough teams and arguments for the appropriateness of using a platform-based approach in order to increase intellectual capital in the energy industry constitute the scientific novelty of the article. This article has a practical value to it as it demonstrates the scaling capability of the elements of the conceptual model, of its operation mechanism, and the best practices of using a science and education platform as the organizational basis for breakthrough projects in the energy sector.