How can innovation be bold enough to make an impact, yet coherent enough to succeed? On the journey from conceptualization to implementation, ideation, scale-up, and risk are inherently linked. The mining industry’s traditional, risk-averse culture and rigid investment and permitting processes can present significant hurdles to deploying disruptive innovations. Balancing the vision required for transformation with the rigor needed to deliver large-scale projects necessitates integrating two very different perspectives.
At Anglo American, our purpose is to "reimagine mining to improve people’s lives". Central to this mission are several homegrown innovations currently being scaled for deployment. In this talk, we will explore how we are bridging the 'valley of death' by working within the traditional stage-gate framework, while enhancing our understanding of risk and systems thinking throughout the technology scale-up process.