A relay race or an ironman? A systematic review of the literature on innovation in the mining sector
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
As global demand for minerals and metals surges, the mining industry is faced with the triple challenge of finite resources, societal resistance, and environmental considerations. To address these challenges the mining sector is relying on innovation and technological advancements to enable exploitation of so far inaccessible deposits, minimize energy consumption, and improve sustainability. This study presents a systematic review of the literature on innovation in mining and the unique management approach being adopted to respond to the above challenges. From an initial corpus of 4059 scientific articles, a reproducible process filtered out 222 documents, published between 1996 and 2023. The analysis reveals that the literature on innovation in the mining industry, predominantly qualitative and exploratory in nature, is showing a shift towards empirical validation using advanced quantitative methods. Mining innovation appears to be shaped by the industry's inherent features such as a conservative culture, market volatility, emphasis on productivity, and profitability. While the industry somewhat risk-averse approach favours stability and specialization which could hamper innovation, its simultaneous focus on productivity encourages innovation to achieve cost reductions, enhanced processes, and implementation of new technology. However, the uniformity of ore and the position of miners in the value chain is not favorable to product innovation and the focus tends to be on —mainly supplier-led— process innovation. The review also shows the potential benefits of non-technological innovations, including marketing and organizational changes although these are infrequent. The study concludes by addressing conceptualizations of innovation and mining management and highlighting gaps in research that focuses on regions, minerals, and innovation types. It also discusses the knowledge management implications in this context. • Analyzed 222 out of 4059 articles for mining innovation trends. • Revealed shift towards quantitative methods in mining research. • Identified unique challenges to innovation in mining vs. other sectors. • Highlighted mining's focus on process over product innovation. • Detailed mining's sustainability and social engagement complexities.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it