Newcrest Mining has launched a new online platform called Newcrest Crowd in partnership with energy and resources-focused collective Unearthed.
Newcrest Crowd is designed as a online channel to draw on the collective knowledge of the resources sector as a way to seek solutions to challenges.
The platform had already been used to solve two challenges during a pilot process over the first half of 2018. The first of these entitled Hydrosaver — a challenge involving predicting the density of tailings underflow inefficiency at Cadia mine to enable more efficient water recycling — was released to the community in February 2018.
The global scale of the project was highlighted by the 750 predictive model solutions received from 12 countries.
At the launch yesterday, Newcrest chief innovation officer Gavin Wood elaborated on the strengths of the program during a keynote presentation about long-term strategic partnerships with the METS sector.
“This sophisticated approach has seen Newcrest develop a clear and mature program through which our pipeline of challenges can be run, potentially unlocking significant ongoing value to Newcrest,” he explained. “There are also contributed benefits for our industry and the community of innovators with whom we work.”
Wood also elaborated on the potential financial opportunities of crowd funding as well.
“We have mining business problems and challenges that we’ve been trying to solve for a long time,” he explained. “By putting these out to ‘the crowd’, we can access different thinking and not be constrained by resource or geographic boundaries.
“This allows us to develop new ideas and solutions in a low-risk, low-cost way, letting our people focus on using their domain expertise and providing opportunities for those who make up the labour force of the future.”