Miners: It’s innovation time – by Anthony Vaccaro (Northern Miner – March 14, 2014)

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. 

Chrysalix Global Network, a venture capital fund based in Vancouver, is looking to spearhead the next wave of innovation in the mining industry.

One of the fund’s partners, Charles Haythornthwaite, was in Toronto for the Prospectors Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) and sat down with The Northern Miner to explain why Chrysalix has decided to target the mining industry and what sort of opportunities it sees.

Miners should pay heed as Chrysalix represents one of the first forays of venture capital into the industry — and it is a fund with the expertise and the capital to drive the sort of early stage technologies that may be standard process in the mines of the future.

“We are looking for transformation breakthrough ideas that could really move the needle in an energy intensive industry,” he says.

The two veins along which the fund is pursuing new technologies are ones that can deliver an environmentally cleaner process and ones that make the industrial process as efficient as possible. Two aims that clearly compliment one another.

While Haythornthwaite says more mining companies are starting to think about the criticality of innovating better, the industry still is not considered to be at the forefront of implementing new ideas.

“The way the mining community should think of innovation is that it’s a little like exploration,” Haythornthwaite says. “Exploration guys understand high risk and high return and manage it by opening up a big funnel of opportunities and, then, as cheaply and quickly as they can, they gain more information so that they can fail fast and fail cheaply. That allows them to rule the failures out and increase their commitment to the ones with true potential. That’s how we treat innovation and build start-up companies.”

Haythornthwaite has a PhD in applied physics and did his MBA at Berkeley before helping to found a start-up company in the solar space. He joined Chrysalix five years ago.

The fund is divided amongst four industry verticals with mining being the most recent addition. The other three are oil and gas, electrical energy and chemicals. It has a long track record, having formed partnerships with leading blue chips in the oil and gas space such as Royal Dutch Shell (LON: RDSA) and Total S.A. (NYSE: TOT).

After raising capital — the current fund raised $150 million — Chrysalix’s team sifts through about 800 opportunities a year to find the three or four that it thinks have the best chance of making a real impact on a given industry.

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