Managing Innovation In The Minerals Industry

Offering the first in-depth global analysis of the innovation ecosystem in the mining industry, this book is aimed at policy-makers and academia alike. A wide range of international contributors assess this from different perspectives, using both a novel mining patent and innovation database and a wide set of analytical approaches.

This book is filled with practical advice for inventors and managers. It charts the course from ideas and needs through selecting the best projects and turning them into successes. Also, the exclusive Inventor Profile is a powerful tool for identifying people with the most inventive potential. It comes from the most productive inventors in the U.S.. There are 45 figures and tables, all backed up with new methods of research and analysis. Yet the style is direct and highly readable.

The book describes all aspects of technical innovation related to the gold and silver industries, from ore identification through to processing. It includes details of comminution, pre-concentration and beneficiation, commercially available and recently developed innovative pyro and hydrometallurgical processes, including leaching processes, separation and purification, and recovery and refining. The book focuses on capital and operating cost estimation, process simulation, waste remediation and minimization. Sustainable gold and silver processes are examined with the use of clean technologies and efficient use of energy and water. Topics such as supply and demand of gold and silver, their exchange in major global markets, and the factors that influence gold and silver prices and major economic indices are discussed. Presents emerging trends and innovations in the areas of ore body knowledge, mining, processing, waste management, economics, finance and automation; Describes emerging enablers for the gold and silver industries such as digitization, automation and remote operations; Promotes breakthroughs in mining, processing, waste management, energy and water from an integrated operations perspective.

This paper analyses the evolution of innovation in the mining sector and how this innovation responds to the economic environment, in particular to changes in commodity prices. For this purpose, we combine commodity price data with innovation data as proxied by patent filings extracted from a novel unit record database containing comprehensive patent and firm level data for the mining sector from 1970 to 2015. We include patents registered both by mining companies and mining equipment, technology and service (METS) firms. With a multi-country panel analysis, we find that innovation in the mining sector is cyclical. Innovation increases in periods of high commodity prices while decreasing during commodity price recessions. Our results suggest that innovation increases mostly with long price cycle variations, while mostly unaffected by medium and short cycles. METS related innovation seem the driving force of this mechanism. In contrast, countries specializing in mining industries are found to be slower in reacting to price changes.

Innovation-Based Development of the Mineral Resources Sector: Challenges and Prospects contains the contributions presented at the XI Russian-German Raw Materials Conference (Potsdam, Germany, 7-8 November 2018). The Russian-German Raw Materials Conference is held within the framework of the “Permanent Russian-German Forum on the Issues of the Use of Raw Materials”, which has as goals to develop new approaches to effectively use energy, mineral and renewable natural resources and to initiate cooperation in the field of sustainability and environmental protection. The contributions cover current trends in the development of raw materials markets and the world economy, the state of the environment and new technologies applied in the sector, effectively responding to modern challenges. The 63 accepted papers are grouped into four main sections: • Mineral exploration and mining • Mining services • Processing of raw materials • Other Innovation-Based Development of the Mineral Resources Sector: Challenges and Prospects will be of interest to academics and researchers involved in the mineral resources sector, but also to professionals in the public, foreign trade and education fields, and representatives of major corporations and professional associations.

Traditionally, the mining sector has been considered a slow innovator compared to other industries, like the manufacturing or pharmaceutical industries. However, we observe an upsurge in the innovation activity of the mining industry in the first half of the 2000s. During this period, mining innovation started to increase rapidly after periods of stagnation and downward trends. To conduct and in-depth investigation of the global trends and patterns behind this structural change in mining innovation, we formulated a general search strategy to identify patent activity in this sector. The strategy is repeatable over time and in multiple databases. It enabled us to produce a dataset of patents in mining and mining-related technologies. Using this newly-created database we identified at the basis of the structural change a switch away from refining technologies into exploration and environmental technologies probably explained by the took over of the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution. The types of actors active in the mining innovation also changed across time: there are now many more individuals, research centers and universities innovating in mining and relatively less companies. Finally, the country composition in the pool of mining innovation activity has radically changed with the appearance of China on the global scene starting from early 2000.