Where Should We Mine?
Posted By Rob Millard - 2 Comments -
I've just read a great story in Mavericks at Work - Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win about open source innovation. Goldcorp, a Canadian gold mining company, buys a risky but promising mine (Red Lake) and spends $10 million on exploration. Comes up with positive but ambivalent results. Posts all their geological data on the internet and holds a contest with a $500,000 prize to be divided amongst 25 semifinalists and 3 finalists chosen by judges, for best solution to question: "Where should we mine?"
More than 1400 experts across the world download their raw data, model it in whatever way they choose, and tell them what they think. (Such exploration data is usually HIGHLY secret so his colleagues think CEO Rob McEwen is crazy.) The result: they get a wealth of data that indicates several possibilities that they hadn't even thought of. Net result: A $100,000 investment in 1993 in Microsoft was worth $895,000 in late 2005. A similar investment in Goldcorp was worth more than $2,9 million!
Learning: How often do we scramble around reinventing the wheel with solutions that have already been discovered elsewhere in the world by others, where we could access those solutions if we were to share knowledge ("secrets") more freely?
http://www.robmillard.com/admin/trackback/16455
Rob,
Fascinating story about GoldCorp! I'm going to hijack it for illustrating the point about looking to leverage others who may already know how to solve my problem.
Mike
You're welcome, Mike. I can recommend the whole book 'Mavericks at Work,' which describes the Goldcorp story in far more detail and also is a darn good read about other 'off the wall' business ideas that have actually worked, too! All the best for 2007! Rob.