How does a $60 billion mining and metals company seek big new ideas from outside its walls?
We recently connected with Paul Perry, VP Innovation at BHP, the Australian company formerly known as BHP Billiton.
“We know that we don’t have a monopoly on great ideas,” he says, “and we felt that as a major player in the mining industry, we had a great opportunity to support a community of innovators to help accelerate their ideas and technology.”
Here’s how BHP is doing that, in Perry’s words.
• • •
The Team
“Think & Act Differently” or “TAD” is a BHP innovation team that builds partnerships with the best technology solution providers to support BHP’s ambition to deliver the future-facing commodities the world needs in new ways. We work with our partners to help them accelerate the development of their ideas.
Meaning
“Think & Act Differently” holds a special meaning to the team and the innovation community that is a part of it. To think differently means acknowledging the importance of diversity of thought and experience to help push the boundaries of what is possible, and being deeply curious, always open to exploring radical new ideas. To act differently means being enthusiastic to try new things, to experiment and not be afraid to fail. We are keen to learn quickly and pivot where necessary, and most importantly take action, doing what we say we will do. Overall, we want to be a great partner for our innovators.
Background
The world’s mission to decarbonize is going to create enormous demand for the raw materials needed to make it happen. To meet that challenge, and the expectations of society that we do so sustainably, we have to think differently about the future of our industry, and we have to move faster than ever before.
We believe that breakthroughs will come when we’re transparent about the opportunities we’re trying to unlock and the challenges we’re trying to solve.
We know that we don’t have a monopoly on great ideas, and we felt that as a major player in the mining industry, we had a great opportunity to support a community of innovators to help accelerate their ideas and technology. We believe that breakthroughs will come when we’re transparent about the opportunities we’re trying to unlock and the challenges we’re trying to solve, encouraging our partners to work together, and with us, to come up with new solutions.
Strategy
We aim to cast the net wide, tapping not just the traditional mining and engineering specialists, but also being curious about what ideas we can adapt from other disciplines and industries.
Our approach is designed to support creativity, velocity, and drive the success of our partners as they scale their businesses.
Goals
Our goal is to find and select the best technologies to mature so that we can deploy them into our assets as fast as possible to grow value. We try to maintain a balanced portfolio so that we can deliver value in the short, medium and longer term.
To find ways to grow our production, we are looking for technologies that can be deployed in our current operations as step-change improvements, as well as combinations of novel technologies that can be knitted together into a new value chain or system, to unlock the resources of tomorrow.
Governance
Everything we do is guided by BHP’s Purpose, which is to bring people and resources together to build a better world. We work closely with our Board and senior management to set our aspirations and with our operations to understand what our opportunities and challenges are, to focus our efforts. We have a disciplined approach to managing our portfolio, which helps us co-develop learning plans with our partners to help them de-risk and develop their technologies.
Collaboration
We collaborate with functional and asset teams across our business. We co-create aspirations and then work together to build technology roadmaps to try to achieve our aspirations. We strive to understand their businesses deeply so that we can work with them to grow through innovation. We’re very mindful of working in partnership with the front line, innovating with them, not for them.
Sourcing
We share our challenges and opportunities so that people with ideas and potential solutions in and outside of our industry have an understanding of how they can help us.
We work closely with our partners to help them derisk their technologies, including providing them samples to allow them to experiment. When they’re ready, we provide test environments so they can pilot scaled-up prototypes and first of a kind solutions.
Startups
We know that sometimes it isn’t easy for innovators, especially from outside the mining industry, to know how to engage with large mining companies, so what we are doing is making this process easier for both the mining companies and the innovators who want to work with us.
We have a part of Think & Act Differently called the Open House. The Open House is a way to share your idea for feedback and the house is always open. It is like a front door for innovation where you can submit any idea. Our expert panel review submissions as they come in, with additional dedicated quarterly reviews. We have the opportunity to work with a range of people, from universities to start-ups to more established companies.
Funding and Support
If an idea can add value, there are various ways that we can develop a relationship. We may send the idea to our in-house corporate venture team, BHP Ventures, or we may look at some type of partnership or funding option. One of the main opportunities at Think & Act Differently is to join a Cohort.
We put together Cohorts of around eight innovators and we support them as much as we can with mentoring and access to technical people and funding while you trial a part of your idea with a short experiment, collaborating and getting support and feedback along the way. Cohorts are usually made up of people who are looking at the same theme, so the cohort also gets together regularly, often once a fortnight, to share progress, learnings, and feedback.
Training
We also run training sessions and workshops to help people articulate the value of their ideas more clearly and, for people outside of mining, we have created a video on “Mining 101” to help them visualize how a site works in its current state and what might be re-imagined.
We find that people get a lot out of being in a cohort and many of our cohorts members have stayed in touch with each other, to work together to iterate on their technologies and ideas.
We are increasing our use of modelling, simulation, and artificial intelligence for innovation concept exploration, design exploration, and product development for accelerating innovation.
Digital Transformation
The ability to collect, curate, democratize and utilize data is critical to our mission to transform mining, so digital transformation goes hand in hand with physical innovation.
Digital approaches are embedded into most of our innovation projects. We are increasing our use of modelling, simulation, and artificial intelligence for innovation concept exploration, design exploration, and product development for accelerating innovation. We experiment with simulation to understand how the incorporation of new technologies can create value within our systems and within new systems or alternative mining value chains.
Examples
3D Seismic technology for hard rock mining is a good example of a recent innovation, because it is a technology that is being adapted from another industry.
BHP teams are partnering with technology provider Viridien to mature the concept. This technology is important to the industry because 3D seismic can obtain deeper, higher resolution ore body and structural information faster than resource characterization approaches using drillholes only. Better ore body knowledge facilitates more efficient mining and processing. 3D seismic is common in the oil and gas industry and an emerging technique in hard rock mining.
To mature this technology for mining, world-first data processing approaches have been co-developed with oil and gas seismic industry expertise to adapt the technology to hard rock orebodies.
By leveraging cross-industry oil and gas seismic expertise, in combination with our local knowledge of the copper deposits in South Australia, we’ve refined some very sophisticated 3D seismic data processing algorithms to obtain high-resolution images of the Olympic Dam orebody to several kilometers of depth.
Evolution
Helping innovators mature their tech or adapt their tech to our industry is critical to accelerating options to unlock new resources. Our Think & Act Differently team welcome fresh perspectives, and diverse expertise. We are constantly evolving how we work so that we can create value for BHP and the innovators and partners who work with us.
Prioritizing Projects and Technologies
We aspire for a future that prioritizes more efficient, lower footprint ways to provide the resources the world needs, and we have created technology roadmaps to achieve these aspirations.
We prioritize technologies that address gaps in our roadmaps that can help us unlock these aspirations. We also prioritize high value opportunities from our assets, particularly if the technology development helps to build capability across our organization.
We work across a range of frontiers, from trialling and embedding higher technology- ready solutions into our existing value chains, de-risking and piloting earlier-stage technologies and stitching together a range of new and existing technologies into novel value chains, enabling us to reimagine future resource development.
Metrics
There are many ways to measure success. We have economic and societal valuations on our projects. When a technology transfer is complete, we can understand how much value that technology has created. Rather than number of technology transfers it is the value created that is important.
We use a range of metrics to help us measure whether we have the right initiatives in our portfolio, whether we have the right velocity in progressing those initiatives and whether we are delivering value to the business. We are also very focused on ensuring that innovators who choose to work with us have a great experience, so we’re very keen to measure ourselves on the quality of what we bring to the table for them.
…There is always a tension between operational reliability and predictability, and the necessary additional risk we need to take on to experiment with new ideas.
Changing Mindsets and Behaviors
I have been really impressed with the way our workforce has embraced our approach to thinking about innovation. When we are thinking about what mining might look like in the future we need to have an understanding of what the world context could be and how megatrends are developing and be designing for that world. This takes quite a bit of creative thinking. Changing our mindset to always think about what opportunities the megatrends are going to unearth is a challenge that our teams are embracing.
At a more granular level, there is always a tension between operational reliability and predictability and the necessary additional risk we need to take on to experiment with new ideas. It’s up to us to appropriately manage that tension and the partnership we have with our operations and the people on the front line really helps us strike the right balance.
Bringing in Ideas from Other Industries
I think one of the biggest opportunities for us is to bring technology and ideas from other industries to mining. Technology doesn’t have to be new, but it might be new to us.
There is an opportunity for potential partners to look at our industry with fresh eyes and suggest how technology from other industries may help us create new value. Then we will need to work together to accelerate the use of that technology in our industry and, taking a full value-chain approach, it is likely that several pieces of technology will collectively contribute to providing a step change in innovation.
We know we don’t have all the answers. We want to be challenged with new ideas and we want to work in partnership with you. We want to transform mining, and we want our partners to be incredibly successful in growing their businesses as they help us do that.
