There is a shared diagnosis that mining is a conservative industry with little innovation culture worldwide, both in new projects and in the continuous improvement and operational excellence of those innovations that are already being developed.
Chile is not exempt from this reality as the most up-to-date sector in terms of technology —which is the operations of private and state large-scale copper mining— uses solutions that have been applied for more than 25 years. This happens because mining companies, in general, base their decisions on minimizing costs with proven technologies rather than generating innovation in their production processes.
Moreover, there is no efficient collaboration model between mining companies, provider companies and national R & D centers, which generates even more difficulties for the process of technological innovation in our country, and
mining companies prefer to work with large transnational providers which have technologies that have already been proven.
In this context, the main motivation that has driven the development of this project —part of Corfo’s National Program for Virtuous Mining— is to help improve the link between the different mining stakeholders (producers, providers and R & D centers) in order to deepen innovation practices through the generation of a global framework that facilitates collaborative innovation, encouraging win-win relationships with the aim of increasing sector competitiveness and diversifying Chile’s exports of goods and services through providers. We believe that this project can help generate the enabling conditions for an increase in the productivity of the mining sector.
