MICA closing the gap in mining innovation

The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation hopes a new program can address the gap between good innovative ideas, and applying them to the mining industry.

While there is no shortage of good ideas and intellectual property related to mining in Canada, many of those ideas and potential innovations lay dormant and are never adopted by companies, said Charles Nyabeze, director of business development with Sudbury's Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation.

To address that gap, the centre is making the case for a new program called the Mining Innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MICA).

“In Canada we can't compete by lowering labour costs,” Nyabeze said. “We can only compete by being more innovative.”

But the research and development departments at large mining companies have been shrinking almost across the board, said Nyabeze, because those investments are risky and don't immediately improve key performance indicators.

Most innovation in the mining sector, he said, comes from small- and medium-sized enterprises like Sudbury-based BESTECH and Symboticware.

But many smaller companies struggle bringing their great ideas to market.

University researchers could develop a new and more efficient way to move material underground, but large mining companies might not even know about it, or take a chance testing the innovation.

Nyabeze said MICA would help provide equity funding, micro loans and bring advisory services to small- and medium-sized enterprises so they can more easily bring their ideas to market.

The Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation has already identified a few barriers to commercializing new mining innovations.

Those include a lack of resources in Canada to secure early adoption of mining innovations, and the absence of a dedicated national organization with commercialization in mining as its main focus.

The centre will submit an application March 6 to the federal government's Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research program to receive up to $15 million, over five years, to support the MICA program.

According to the application, private sector partners would match any federal investment into the program.

Nyabeze and his colleagues have already started to meet with industry partners to help make their case to the government, and secure financial support for the project.

In a webinar on Feb. 4, Nyabeze was able to reach out to around 65 industry partners to make his case for MICA.

If all goes according to plan, the program would launch in March 2016, Nyabeze said.