The editor of strategy+business, Randall Rothenberg, describes the phenomenon this way: “
...Companies can no longer keep their own innovations secret unto themselves ... the key to success is creating, in effect, an open platform around your innovations so your customers, your employees and even your competitors can build upon it, because only by that building will you create an on-going, evolving community of users, doers and creators.”
This approach requires internal processes
geared to innovative, entrepreneurial thinking within organisations as well as within the sector. “There is a rigour and science behind innovation,” believes Botha. “It is not as easy as getting a group of people into a room and telling them to think. To support innovation you do need to get the ‘soft’ stuff right too, such as HR and internal processes.”
Botha’s approach is firmly grounded in knowledge management and creating a corporate culture which does not dampen innovative thinking but opens up the floor to ideas and dissenting views. “If you cannot get knowledge management right internally then you certainly will not get it right externally,” she stresses. To get it right requires retaining knowledge within an organisation, identifying pools of innovation and skills both within the organisation and the sector and bringing those people and business units together to collaborate.
“Innovation must happen at a multi-level,” says Botha. “It is about the project level too, and there you need to tap into the organisational knowledge. At an organisational level it is about coming up with good ideas
and then making those ideas work for you as an organisation. It is about how you synthesise it into your business model.” Sometimes, she admits, that is easier said than done. Are we ready, for example, for nanotechnology in mining? “I do not think so, not yet,” says Botha.
Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.
But certainly the future of innovation in mining walks hand-in-hand with technology. No one knows this better than Michael Joseph, a former school teacher who now drives Anglo Platinum’s industrial development and beneficiation unit. His work is at the core of how mining is having to stretch itself beyond drilling for raw materials into the applications and opportunities which spring from the natural resources.
“We are very good at taking metals out
of rock; what we have not been good at is adding value by making something out of it,” admits Joseph. “Our challenge in the platinum industry is to find other applications for platinum.”
April 2012 | Management Today 81
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