A smaller gold-mining company from Quebec, Canada, Integra Gold, wanted to identify the best locations on which to focus their resources to identify new gold streams. They had heaps of data – more than 6 terabytes that covered a 75-year history. Typically mining companies are extremely secretive but the style of the MD and senior management team was totally different. Instead of paying analysts to examine the data and spend years checking results, they decided to seek help from the crowd.

They launched a crowdsourced competition, sharing the data with all interested parties, with a total prize pot of 1 million Canadian dollars for those presenting the most innovative and creative solutions

(Integra Gold, 2015). The aim was to get much faster results and share the reward. This was a totally unheard-of method of working in this sector and heralded a new disruptive style.

The five winners included one firm that already provided this service but they adopted a different approach, using virtual reality to better explore the mines (Market Wired, 2016).

Questions

• What do you think about crowdsourcing for a strategic aspect of the business, as in this case example?

• What are the risks involved in sharing data in this way?

• How else would you have solved the issue of analysing years of data?