In 1973, American engineer and inventor, Martin Cooper, made a call on a prototype Motorola DynaTAC – considered to be the world’s first commercially available portable handheld cell phone.
Fast forward almost 50 years and, today, there are around 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide, nearly half the global population. It’s hard to believe that something considered so pioneering only a short while ago could go on to become as fundamental to our daily lives.
Trends Are Not Just Followed, They Are Also Created
This is just one example of an innovation scaling to such magnitude. At Anglo American, we draw inspiration from these global success stories. Since establishing our market development team, we have been working hard to create the space for innovation within the Platinum Group Metals (PGM) industry.
We do this through customer-centric collaborations and a dedicated investment programme – which includes both AP Ventures, an independent venture capital fund established in 2018, as well as our own venture-led research partnerships.
The impact of the former is in scaling start-ups and businesses that have sufficiently de-risked their technology or product offerings, while the latter partners with academia and corporates on early-stage research and development.
Of course, growing and sustaining demand within existing segments is only one part of the equation. Another is to find new uses for PGMs by diversifying end applications. As computer scientist, Alan Kay, put it: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
Disrupting the Technology Lifecycle
This is the mindset behind our latest effort, a venture building programme that focuses on challenges for which PGMs could offer a solution and seeks to configure, combine and integrate inventions or ideas into meaningful PGM-based products and services – with a direct or indirect impact on demand – before building a strategy, brand, team and growth capital around them.
The approach being tested, and that we will refine over time, deviates from the well-trodden path of commercialisation which, while well-proven, can sometimes prove costly and time-consuming, and may not always meet the needs of the industry or end-user.
Through broadly scanning and sourcing what is and is not out there, we seek to better understand the potential landscape for PGMs, before taking the most impactful ideas, and turning them into ‘venture-able’ products, services and companies, orientated around opportunity-pull rather than pure technology-push.
Benny Oeyen, Anglo American’s Executive Head of PGMs Market Development said: “If we look at product development solely through the lens of the segments we already operate in, then we already know who our customers are and have the answers to the questions we are asking. While it is possible to innovate within those segments and we are doing that, this allows us to refocus our lenses on the longer-term future for PGMs.
“That means looking beyond our customers and our customers’ customers, to who we, as an industry, could be serving in future. We’re working to develop a programme that can go out, innovate and accelerate the pace of doing so.”
The physicochemical properties of PGMs help here, making them valuable as a metal and for use in numerous chemical processes and applications. Hydrogen is perhaps the most obvious example with a number of PGM applications having potential including fuel cells for use in vehicles and electrolysers producing hydrogen from water. We believe there are other areas of opportunity out there with ‘hydrogen-sized’ potential. PGMs in batteries, spintronics and medical diagnostics are among these examples.
Partners in Creation
To help us drive innovation at pace, we are collaborating with leading venture studios – Rainmaking Venture Studios and Deep Science Ventures.
Benny added: “Our venture building activities are guided by our company values and purpose.
This is about stimulating the creation of multiple new initiatives simultaneously to shape opportunities, each with the potential to unlock barriers to incrementally increase existing demand, or to generate new demand by enabling other applications.
It benefits entrepreneurs, customers and our partners, by providing a low-risk environment through which to prove the viability of their ideas, bringing these inventions closer to the market, and it will help to support the sentiment around PGMs globally.”