The future competitiveness of Finnish industry will be built on bold innovation. At Intelligent Industry 26, Sandvik’s Mats Eriksson explained why innovation must look beyond individual products and technologies to the customer’s entire operating environment, and how new ideas can move from experiments into everyday use.
The mining industry faces growing pressure to reinvent itself. Deposits are located deeper underground, ore grades are often lower and operating conditions are increasingly demanding. At the same time, expectations for safety, productivity and sustainability continue to rise.
According to Eriksson, remaining competitive in this environment takes the courage to rethink not only technology, but also how customer challenges are solved. At Sandvik, this means advancing automation, electrification, data and AI and, above all, bringing these capabilities together into solutions that create tangible customer value.
Innovation starts with seeing beyond the individual product
In global competition, the lead gained through a single product or technology can disappear quickly as competitors bring similar solutions to market at an accelerating pace. For Eriksson, the competitiveness of Finnish industry will therefore not be determined by our ability to build the best individual product. What matters is how successfully we combine products, software, data and services into a coherent whole that creates value for the customer.
At Sandvik, this means developing increasingly comprehensive solutions alongside individual machines supporting customers from mine planning all the way to production optimisation.
“Bold innovation is about seeing beyond a single product or technology. The greatest customer value comes from making different solutions work together to solve the real challenges customers face every day,” Eriksson summarises.
Data brings control to a constantly changing mining environment
A mine is an operating environment in constant change. As excavation progresses, conditions, routes and production needs evolve, requiring operations to adapt continuously.
Sandvik has responded by developing solutions that bring planning, production and operations closer together. Eriksson highlights the AutoMine® Aura platform and Deswik software, for example. Together, they support mine automation, planning and production optimisation while enabling more effective use of data.
“Autonomous machines, remote operation, real-time monitoring and analytics help us make a constantly changing mining environment safer, more efficient and more predictable.”
For Eriksson, bold innovation also means ensuring that emerging technologies such as AI are not added as a separate layer on top of existing operations. Instead, they should become an integral part of how the entire mine is planned, managed and developed.
Next-generation solutions are built through experimentation
According to Eriksson, innovation begins with a deep understanding of the customer and a problem that truly matters. At Sandvik, new solutions are developed as concepts and tested in practice together with customers. Each experiment also generates insight for the next generation of solutions.
“Not every concept is intended for commercialisation. Even so, experiments can reveal new directions and generate valuable learning,” Eriksson says.
A broader ecosystem also contributes to the work, from research organisations and universities to a range of innovation programmes. Eriksson believes that creating new solutions requires expertise to be combined across organisational boundaries.
The ability to scale determines whether innovation succeeds
Eriksson emphasises that developing a new solution is only the first step. Innovation creates business impact when a proven solution can be scaled from an experiment into production.
That takes more than good ideas.
“Innovation requires leadership commitment and sustained investment. It also takes trust in people and the courage to give them room to experiment and learn. At the same time, organisations must identify the experiments that have the potential to grow from individual solutions into wider use.”
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