Technological Learning in Petroleum Industry: Case Study of Development Projects in South Pars Gas Field

Technological learning is deemed an important factor in the innovation system of petroleum industry in Iran which, as a developing country, requires expediting its’ development process. Repeated execution of development projects in petroleum industry shows that technological learning has not had a favorable occurrence. This paper aims to identify the factors affecting technological learning in large socio-technical systems. In this paper, a process model is provided for technological learning in petroleum industry and the bottlenecks are identified as well. The results of field study and empirical evidence in petroleum industry reveal that the institutional regime of petroleum industry weakens technological scenarios. This regime suffers a lock-in which leads to the "negative co-evolution" of active industry actors and subsequently impairment of technological learning. The negative co-evolution creates a change of strategy in the supply side. Suppliers try to adopt strategies which are in favor of the current regime in order to safeguard their position in the market. This leads to dominancy of obsolete technological routines in the firms and ultimately failure of technological learning in the petroleum industry.