Newcrest and Unearthed launch The Newcrest Crowd platform for disruptive technologies
One of the world’s largest gold mining companies has unveiled a crowd sourcing platform designed to harness the collective wisdom of digital innovators and entrepreneurs to tackle real-world mining problems through innovation.
Newcrest announced in a statement this week that, through a partnership with Unearthed Solutions, it has created The Newcrest Crowd platform.
Following a pilot process earlier in 2018 which saw two hackathon challenges, Newcrest launched The Newcrest Crowd this week.
Speaking at the launch, Newcrest Chief Innovation Officer Gavin Wood pointed to a number of successes and positive financial benefits from crowd-sourced solutions and partnering through hackathon events with Unearthed since partnering back in 2015.
“We have mining business problems and challenges that we’ve been trying to solve for a long time. 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,” said Wood.
Newcrest successfully held the first challenge of The Newcrest Crowd back in February 2018 in which the company asked innovators to predict the density of a tailings underflow inefficiency at its Cadia Mine.
Dubbed the Hydrosave competition, Newcrest challenged Unearthed’s community to come up with a solution and more than 150 individuals submitted more than 750 predictive models. The winning team, Three Springs Technology, are currently actively working at the site implementing their winning solution.
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Newcrest has been working with Unearthed since 2015 to steadily build its strategy to access digital innovators via multiple hackathons and other online competitions.,
“Newcrest’s significant commitment to developing a structured and repeatable crowdsourcing program, and equipping their people with new, efficient methods to solve multi-million-dollar challenges, makes them a stand-out in the international mining industry and innovator community,” said Unearthed Founding Director Justin Strharsky.
