Open innovation in copper mining is the name of the game

Innovation is one of the strategic pillars of major copper producers such as BHP and Antofagasta Minerals.

Mining companies are aware that innovation does not only come from within the company, but they can open their doors to the external ecosystem, inviting startups, medium and small companies and universities to resolve some of their biggest challenges.

Chile’s Antofagasta Minerals has been implementing for some time an open innovation platform called Innovaminerals, which serves as an entrance door for suppliers to send their initiatives to solve the operational challenges of the company, said Leonardo González, CEO of the company’s Minera Antucoya unit, at the Exponor mining fair in Antofagasta city.

The company publishes its biggest challenges and the entrepreneurs pitch in ideas within the platform. Three are the key areas that suppliers should focus on in 2019: automation and robotics, low grade minerals and tailings deposits, González said.

“These meetings have been developed with Expande since 2018. We’ve received a total of 400 ideas and we’ve had 14 pitches and 100 companies have presented solutions to us,” he said.

A success story is the tech-based company Sociedad de Innovación y Transferencia Tecnológica (ETT) which is working in Antofagasta’s Pelambres mine to build a pilot plant to monitor a SAG mill in real time through cameras installed in the feed chutes.

At Antucoya, the company Innovaxxion will implement an augmented reality solution to avoid risks and increase productivity and costs.

“Innovaminerals began as a platform for people inside the company to pitch ideas but afterwards we opened it to the general public, meaning suppliers, scientists and universities. The entrepreneurs present their idea to an innovation board and the board can assign capital expenditures to the projects if they need to be implemented on a pilot or industrial scale,” told BNamericas González.

The Expande program helps in the preselection of candidates that later the company chooses to advance to the next stage.

The program was started with the support of Alta Ley corporation and Fundación Chile, with the strategic challenges in mind of Antofagasta Minerals, BHP, state copper miner Codelco, and most recently the Collahuasi copper mine in northern Chile.

Expande is an open innovation program of a public-private nature, which promotes the development of high potential solutions from technology-based companies and connects them with the challenges that mining companies face.

BHP also works with Expande, Cleve Lightfoot, head of innovation delivery at the company, told BNamericas.

“Last year we presented 14 initiatives and 25 this year. Expande helps to create financial value not only for us but for the tech companies. It makes us realize that we can use resources from outside. In BHP we don’t have to resolve everything ourselves,” said Lightfoot.

BHP launched its official challenges for this year at Exponor, one of them being the reduction of water losses due to retention, resaturation, infiltration or evaporation in the tailings deposits.

The mining company presents its operational challenges, Expande through "tech scouting" selects the companies that have innovative technologies to resolve these challenges and then the company develops and validates the technology.