IOR in its purest sense is really about improving recovery factors, and has now probably gone beyond the search for a “silver bullet” that will make step-change improvements to recovery, with the exception of heavy oils. The most appropriate and credible approach to IOR is to integrate all the best practice available, while staying connected to the research community that continues to make improvements to the state-of-the-art. Hence IOR is now really an exercise in multi-disciplinary knowledge acquisition and application, as this paper attempts to demonstrate by introducing contributions made by the Institute of Petroleum Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, to reservoir characterisation, modelling and management.