1 June 2010, Paris. When Fronteiras Mineracoes bought a Kaolin mine in 2009 in Joa Pessoa, Brazil, they knew that mining was a risky business.  In kaolin, used mainly in porcelain and medicine, profit margins are tight.  But it soon became clear to them that the financial risks are nothing compared to the risk shouldered by workers.

“When you enter this business you cannot believe what sorts of casualty rates are associated with mining–even using all the best practices.  You lose miners every year and you’re considered a socially responsible mine.”

Across the world, mining tops the lists of hazardous occupations.  But it’s not always or primarily a matter of owner callousness or lax regulation.  Simply: for many steps in the extraction process, advanced, mechanized techniques are difficult to implement or don’t exist and safety measures don’t do enough to prevent death and injury rates.

“It’s a problem of knowledge more than money. Our mine is already state-of-the-art.  The problem is that the state-of-the-art falls far short of where it needs to be to minimize the human costs of mining.”

For Erlie Lenz, who’s already brought a progressive mining culture to Fronteiras Mineracoes, augmenting salaries and providing education for children of miners, there were no more casualty-minimizing options left, save for shutting down the mine and giving pink slips to the labor force.

But a chance encounter with a French entrepreneur at a Sao Paulo social function renewed Lenz’s optimism for change.  The entrepreneur, Oussama Ammar, is founder and CEO of hypios.com, a firm that organizes online R&D prize competitions and specializes in global expert-identification.  Together, the two hashed out an inspiring, and simple plan to bring Fronteiras Mineracoes”s mine into the 21st century: Formalize the technical issues to be solved, put a price tag on them, and send them out to the world.

It’s a formula that’s already brought hypios’ clients significant results.  hypios has successfully found solutions for companies in areas ranging from food packaging to 3-D imaging and the firm has a global reach: with a global solver base of 120,000+.  Their proprietary expert identification technologies can help disseminate problems even further.  Ammar says “If a mine in Canada or Russia has a solution, or a University researcher in China, hypios will be able to pick that person out of the crowd.  Our motto is simple: the solution’s out there and we’ll find it.”

Within a few weeks of the meeting the problems were already posted on hypios’ website.  Broken down into 10 pieces, each able to be solved separately, the company devoted $150,000 in this first call for specific proposals.  “We’re looking for transformations that will have a real impact and we think we’ve found a good partner in hypios” say Erlie Lenz.

Fronteiras Minerações
Fronteiras Mineraçoes owns a Kaolin Mine in Joa Pessoa. Fronteiras Mineraçoes wants to achieve its objectives as a company while improving the working conditions and respecting the integrity of its employees, values too often neglected in the mining industry. The company is committed to innovation in all aspects of the process, in order to reduce costs, increase sustainability, and set an example for other companies.

hypios

Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service. “Seekers” post R&D problems to the network and select a deadline and a price for the successful “Solver.” Hypios, which draws from a network of 950,000 experts across the world, has been solving R&D problems for global companies since 2008.

Press Contact:

Contact the hypios press center at info@hypios.com. US inquiries by telephone can be directed to Michael Roguly at (949) 233-3404; European inquiries may be directed to Klaus-Peter Speidel at +33 (0)6 74 20 61 77.

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