Case Study
Advising a global mining company on the potential of disruptive technologies
Technology Scanning | Analysis of Competitors | Benchmarking and best practices
Business need
- A global mining firm was identifying disruptive technologies that may have the most significant impact on it, both favourable and unfavourable.
- To drive the above initiative, it wanted to benchmark the competing technologies and adoption levels and evaluate their likely impact and the degree of their disruptiveness for its internal development.
To examine the disruptive technology landscape and assess the adoption feasibility in mining operations.
The client outlined two key reasons for selecting RocSearch:
- Our ability to identify innovation opportunities through technology scouting.
- Our wide exposure to benchmarking and best practice studies in the global mining sector.
Approach and Methodology
- Our strategic advisory team reviewed the existing themes/ scenarios and underlying technologies shared by the client and proposed changes to underlying technologies that would underpin them. We subsequently benchmarked how the client compared to its competitors on the use of underlying technologies.
RocSearch conducted an impact analysis of various disruptive technologies and summarised it in a value chain matrix for each competitor.
- We identified the best-in-class companies outside the mining sector and explored their positions in the underlying technology space. Here, we particularly focused on industries with high usage of these technologies.
- We evaluated how the clients’ competitors developed and adopted these technologies to create potential step-change improvements in their value chain and social value creation.
- We shared comparative insights on several quantitative and qualitative aspects such as the number of patents/ publications, technology readiness levels and technology adoption.
Business Outcomes
- The client’s strategy team presented the insights to its board, guiding the firm’s future development and investment decisions on innovative technology solutions.
- The study provided learnings on how these technologies could play a critical role in improving their overall efficiency and optimising their processes.
- The client integrated the findings of the study into the disruptive technology paper that it published.
The output guided the client’s subsequent development and investment decisions on innovative technology solutions.
