The DEEO project investigates opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation in the mining industry and is funded under the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Discovery Projects funding scheme. The chief investigators on this project are Dr Henri Burgers, Professor Per Davidsson and Associate Professor Paul Steffens. The research team also comprises Dr Van de Vrande, our international partner investigator based in Rotterdam, and Dr Sandeep Salunke, a postdoctoral research fellow at ACE.
The project is being undertaken in the backdrop of unprecedented global macro-economic and geo-political changes by which the Australian mining sector is now experiencing one of its most exciting times. Given these changes and the sheer scale of demand for resources, the mining industry is faced with a conundrum of sorts in its approach towards innovation. While tremendous progress has been made in terms of safety and productivity by decades of incremental innovation and continuous process improvement, there have not been great leaps forward. There seem to be bottlenecks in the emergence of disruptive innovations that have the capacity to transform the mining industry.
The industry at its core comprises mining firms and supplier firms that actively support them. Both types of firms bring different strengths and face different hurdles in the discovery and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities that lead to innovation. The study will for the first time compare the differences in the approaches and the challenges faced by entrepreneurs in innovatively delivering a problem-driven solution vis-à-vis proactively creating opportunities. Initial findings suggest that current approaches in the mining industry are optimised for providing solutions for problems provided by clients (i.e. the mining companies), yet constrain the development of entrepreneurial opportunities that may have potential but are not driven directly by client demands.
We combine case study research and survey in the Australian resources and mining industry to generate new fundamental knowledge that provides a common framework to study (corporate) entrepreneurship in the mining industry. This new knowledge will benefit managers not only to understand and manage the processes underlying discovery and exploitation, but also to facilitate the collaboration in terms of opportunities for innovation between mining and supplier firms. In particular, the unique features of the mining industry (e.g. few but very large clients, capital intensity, limited scale economies, client/ problem-driven nature of the opportunity process) may provide important new insights for existing innovation and entrepreneurship practices.
The study is in initial stages of case study research and we are currently looking for respondents in senior managerial positions in the mining industry who have in-depth knowledge of the innovation, opportunity recognition and commercialisation process in the mining and resources sector. These in-depth interviews, each lasting around 45-60 minutes will help the researchers to generate rich insights in relation to the innovation and opportunity process and provide the basis for a survey to be sent out to a nationwide sample of companies. With your help, this knowledge will be a stepping stone to enhance our understanding of innovation and entrepreneurship in the Australian mining and resources sector.
For further information please contact Dr Henri Burgers or Dr Sandeep Salunke.