It is a great pleasure and honor for me to invite my most respected colleagues from both academia and industry to participate in a very important scientific event for our oil and gas industry and that is the 15th International Conference of IIES (Institute for International Energy Studies) and have the chance and opportunity to meet, welcome and host international and national experts to share knowledge and take advantage of the vast experience. To my belief our 100 year old oil industry who has a great dependency on technology has been counting years for such an event to occur and this should be considered as a turning point towards developing a knowledge and innovation based oil industry rather than a merely operation wised one.

Like our previous 14 conferences which have bridged scientific themes and topics towards the needs and necessities of our industry I am really hopeful that this 15th conference will also take recent developments and state of the art knowledge of technology and innovation management into the industry and connect experts in the area to managers and decision makers in the field. From my point of view, our oil industry in recent years has chosen to pave the way of shifting from a technology consuming industry towards a technologically innovative one. Technology management is a valuable tool to facilitate this achievement. This conference dedicated to “Technology and Innovation in Oil and Gas Industry” offers the opportunity to TM specialists to present and share their knowledge and expertise in developing and applying new and effective tools, techniques and solutions to related problems of the industry and gives our managers, experts and colleagues in the industry the chance to take advantage.

Institute for International Energy Studies which is affiliated to the Iranian Ministry of Oil has recently been granted with the mission to promote technology management knowledge and tools to the benefit of the oil industry. This has been started in 2009 by establishing a new research center in the institute called “Strategic Technology Studies”. As the chair of this new research center I have the honor and chance to serve as the secretary of IIES 15 scientific committee and am looking forward an active and fruitful cooperation with colleagues from inside and outside of the country.

I have no words to thank the International Association of Management of Technology (IAMOT) for its scientific support of this scientific event which has motivated all of us in IIES. Specifically I have to thank Professor Yasser Hosni (IAMOT President) and Professor Tarik Khalil (IAMOT former president and chairman of IAMOT 2010) for all their kind and effective support and for accepting my invitation to join our scientific committee. I have to also thank every individual member of the scientific committee for accepting invitations to join and for supporting the event which would make it a unique scientific gathering in our oil and gas technology and innovation management.

Finally I would like to formally and cordially invite all experts from all over the world to participate in this event either by submitting papers, proposing workshops, delivering lectures or simply by taking part in the conference and taking advantage of the knowledge shared. To our international guests I suggest spending a couple of more days in Iran to have the pleasure of our visiting some of our country’s historical places and beautiful landscapes.
Looking forward your participation and to meeting you in IIES 15.
S. Farhang Fassihi