Why get involved in Unearthed Challenges?

• Speak directly to industry customers about your solution (no corporate procurement department)

• Super easy process

• You keep all IP - nothing to lose, everything to gain

Welcome to Unearthed; the largest community of SMEs, startups, developers, and data scientists making the energy and resources industry more efficient and sustainable.

Open innovation to us, is not about gathering ideas, it’s about collaborating and solving problems together, and growing a healthy ecosystem of businesses delivering innovative solutions to the industry.

The Unearthed community is passionate about solving challenges that represent verified opportunities to help resource companies become more sustainable. And, the team at Unearthed are committed to helping our community build commercial relationships with our resources partners to solve these challenges together.

By their nature of being open, challenges help individuals and companies not just solve specific problems, but build their brand within the sector, and help grow their customer base globally.

How does it work?

The Unearthed team works with our resources industry partners to frame problems and opportunities for the community to solve. Each challenge is verified. This means, it is a problem that our resources partner is committed to solving, has the budget and resources to do so, and is driven to create partnerships to achieve an outcome.

Companies and individuals are invited to put forward their solutions or ideas and to demonstrate how their capabilities can solve the challenge.

You can take part by submitting a solution to the challenge via a form on the challenge website. The submission consists of a few questions about your solution, and a place to upload a short presentation. We try to keep the submission process simple and short, so if you do have a suitable solution, it shouldn’t take you long to submit to the challenge.

Challenges are usually open for 4 to 6 weeks. After a challenge closes, Unearthed supports our industry partner to review all the submissions, and connect with solutions that resonate with the challenge. A first meeting is conducted, to determine how you might work with the industry partner, and what future steps might look like. From here, if there is a desire from both parties to work together, Unearthed steps out of the process to allow you to continue building that relationship.

 

Hear how construction solution provider Comply Flow, secured BHP as their first mining client, through the BHP Fast Track Challenge

 

"I love how Unearthed is delivering new ways for mining companies and start-ups to grow together. Given the high quality of submissions for this competition I’m very excited that my proposal was awarded. I’m now looking forward to working with Newcrest and the team at Cadia Mine to develop a solution that provides maximum business benefit while being a joy to use" - Chris James, on Newcrest's Start Me Up Challenge

People in the community are passionate about supporting and promoting each other. Here we share an open discussion with some of the winners of ExploreSA on data science, and how to work with them.

FAQs

Q: Do Unearthed Challenges offer a real, commercial opportunity for my business and product, or is this a market research exercise?

A: Yes, Unearthed Challenges represent a verified commercial opportunity for companies who participate in the challenge.

The team at Unearthed take the time to work with our Industry Partners to validate all opportunities and ensure there is company support and a path to implementation for successful innovators.

For each participant, the opportunity exists for your solution or product to be trialled and/or purchased by our Industry Partner.

 

Q: How are Challenges different from a tender process?

A: A tender process is a formal, structured procedure for obtaining offers from different suppliers. Businesses who participate in a tender process are typically required to submit a tender bid; an often onerous and time consuming task.

Open Innovation Challenges are different!

Unearthed Challenges offer a new path to sales, that is more agile, faster and less time consuming than a traditional tendering process.

Challenges have some great advantages over tenders including:

• Participants solve a problem
  Tenders often require bids to meet mandatory and prescriptive solutions requirements, excluding those that don't comply.
  Open Innovation Challenges provide the opportunity to present how a problem can be solved, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking without pre-defining the solution.
• Get in front of the business owners
  Traditional tender processes are often run by a procurement team via highly structured and time consuming processes. The effort to engage procurement can represent a barrier for small businesses who simply can’t afford the time or resources
  Open Innovation Challenges provide the opportunity to bypass procurement and get in front of the business challenges owners to demonstrate a solution, creating internal demand, and supporting a more streamlined approach to sales.
• Innovation focused
  Challenges are unlike tender processes that often favour the incumbent supplier, and focus on finding the same solution to fix a known problem in the same way.
  Open Innovation Challenges are designed and support new, better, smarter ways of working and are focused on obtaining new ideas for solving business problems.

 

Q: Is this just an opportunity for big companies to get free advice and ideas?

A: No, the purpose of open innovation challenges is to connect those people with the problem to those with the skills and capabilities to solve it. Unearthed ensures that all the challenges put forward are verified, and that there is a real commitment to solving them. Intellectual Property (IP) always remains with the problem solvers.

 

Q: What does a Challenge Submission involve?

A: The Unearthed Team understands that committing resources from a small team to build a submission for a challenge can be a big decision. You have limited resources and you have to make the most of your time.

That is why our submission process is simple and straightforward.

A submission requires you to complete a short application form (webform) and supply a pitch deck (PDF or PPT) up to 5 pages describing your solution. If you want to add more you can, but that’s up to you.

 

Q: How much does it cost to participate?

A: That’s the great thing - it costs nothing to participate in an Unearthed Challenge.

 

Q: When will I get a response to my submission?

A: We get it - feedback is a gift and you’re keen to get some!

The Unearthed Challenge process is designed to get you real feedback quickly. Following the close of a challenge we aim to get initial feedback within 3-4 weeks.

And, for some of our challenges we offer the opportunity to get feedback mid-challenge, so that you can be sure you are on the right track.

Timings for feedback are featured on the challenge page, so make sure you keep an eye out.
 

Q: Do challenges have prize money?

A: Most of our open innovation challenges do not have prize money, because the real prize is securing new business or a new customer. Data science challenges, which involve building machine learning models, do have prize money.
 

Q: How do I get involved?

A: Think you’re ready to get involved? Click here to view a list of current challenges.