140 people gathered at this year’s Swedish Mining Innovation and Research Day and the theme was Enabling innovation for a sustainable future.
It was a day about how Sweden enables the green transition and creates international competitiveness and innovation in the mining industry and he audience included universities, industry, small and medium-sized enterprises and political decision-makers.
Some of the lessons and insights from the day:
📌Wide collaboration to transform the education and research system so that it serves the needs of the future.
– We need strategic innovation initiatives that resonates with the needs in the knowledge-intensive industries, said Emil Görnerup research and innovation political expert at Svenskt Näringslivs trade association.
📌Long-term perspective, transparency and stability are crucial conditions for collaborative innovation to actually happen.
⁃ Building strong research and innovation arenas takes 10-20 years. Basic and applied research goes hand in hand in that process and there needs to be close dialogue between the universities and industry, said Jenny Greberg VP Technology LKAB.
📌 Sustainable and resilient value chains – can we have both? And what challenges should we focus on?
From a circularity viewpoint, we need to re-think and innovate beyond technology, we need to explore new business models for secondary commodities, review policy-making and find new partnerships, not least internationally, said Lars Nybom, Ragn-Sells.
– Approaching our challenges from an eco-system angle, we can drive the kind of inter-disciplinary research that is necessary to understand value chains, said professor Marta-Lena Antti, Luleå tekniska universitet.
We were also very proud to present a few examples of results and impact from the Swedish Mining Innovation, ranging from low energy communition and nitrate-free explosives to a national bio-diversity agenda and a smart mining system demonstrator.
⁃In nine years, Swedish Mining Innovation and its cluster of partners has come a long way on mobilizing broadly, constantly adapting and evolving towards a system innovation. The roadmaps, the portfolio and focus of projects and innovative ways to attract fresh input and wider engagement from stakeholders are remarkable, Helen Andréasson, Sweco summarized the external review of the programme that was carried out in 2022.
The conference was held on May 9 at Kulturens Hus in Luleå and is hosted by the strategic innovation programme Swedish Mining Innovation (funded by Vinnova, the Swedish Energy Agency and Formas).
Charlotte Andersson, Programme Director, Swedish Mining Innovation.
