Kirk Coburn, founder and MD of Houston-based ‘Surge’ energy software accelerator, reflecting on its first year of operations in his blog, believes that entrepreneurs are best placed to react to changes in cultural, technological and legal context. When the context evolves, entrepreneurs create revolutionary ideas. Surge offers early stage capital funding for energy software developers from its network of venture capitalists and corporate development groups.
Surge tracks contextual changes in real time—one of which is the generational crew change in the energy industry which has created a ‘massive gap’ in experience between the baby boomers who are about to retire and the majority of young and as yet inexperienced younger employees.
Oil and gas companies were early innovators in supercomputing and data visualization and analysis. But most of these technologies were built by baby boomers using old platforms ‘like Fortran.’ Today, entrepreneurs are ‘challenging the old paradigms and developing new concepts—if the incumbents cannot keep up, new start-ups will.’ Apply to Surge or email melanie@surgeaccelerator.com.
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