A conference was planned, people were writing and organizing, and then thing went awry. Here is what I wrote on the topic of Mining Research and Education in anticipation of the now postponed conference. I post these writings now, rather than hide them for a year or more, in the hope that controversial as they are, they may contribute to argument and discussion—hence the formulation of answers by those more knowledgeable than I am. The first question posed by the conference organizers was: What are the best steps to take to promote the essential need for R&D in the Mining Industry? Here is my answer:

I believe all research, and specifically research directed to the world¬wide mining industry should be based on this paradigm or algorithm: establish a system that generates more ideas than can be researched or implemented; scrutinize all ideas for worth and merit; discard bad idea; develop good ideas; disseminate the results of the good ideas to those who can implement them; and generate more new ideas on the basis of the successful, implemented ideas. You may think of this as simply research evolution.

On the basis of this paradigm, I conclude that there is no exclusivity on the generation of new ideas—everybody, regardless of education or training is a potential source of new ideas and my system would seek to capture all these ideas—very much as is done in the Brainstorming Session for a comprehensive Value Engineering Workshop.

Scrutinizing ideas for R&D related to mining must involve judgment and opinions, and here my system would place the judgment function onto as many juries of peers as can be assembled. Groups from all segments of industry should contribute at one point or the other: I would include manufacturers, sellers, users, salesmen, consultants, magazine writers, miners, academics, and pestilential critics of all stripes. The group providing the funding for further work would have the right to choose the committee to scrutinize the work they fund. This could be a group of lecturers associated with a consortium of universities, the board of directors of a think tank, the R&D VP and staff of a manufacturing company, the technology development division of an international mining company. There is no end to the diversity of peer groups that could and should sift through new ideas for mining-related R&D. I would not allow the task to become the exclusive preserve of a self¬ selecting group closely allied to the industry. That will only breed stasis like so many other august bodies convened to promote national objectives.

Money is required to develop good ideas. So the more well¬ funded R&D institutions and groups in a country and industry, the better. I cannot support the notion that the taxpayer benefits in the long¬ run, and so should pay in the short term. I distrust any government funded and controlled initiative. I believe that every research group should compete in the free market for the research monies made available as a matter of national policy by governments, in the interests of industry by the mines, and as a matter of personal glory by rich persons.

I know it is easy to point to Darwin and Einstein and the advances they made in the absence of well ¬funded research programs. Some fundamental work can indeed be done on inherited fortunes and poorly paid postal salaries, but most of the topics we need to R&D in the mining industry involve teams and money to collect and evaluate data. So we need to encourage as many independent sources of funding as we possible can to keep the free ¬market part of my algorithm functioning. And if society does not do it then I submit the only proper sources of such funds is the mining industry.

I addressed many other questions posed by the conference organizers.  You can find the rest of what I wrote on this topic at this link; it is on of those pesky pdfs and may take a while to download, but I hope it is interesting–it is certainly controversial.  Although that is not why they cancelled the conference.