Innovation at Risk: The Role of Safety Teams in Mining Transformation
Innovation at Risk: The Role of Safety Teams in Mining Transformation
Why translating between research, technology and operations is now core safety work essential for mining innovation.
Across high risk industries, we’re seeing a growing push to leverage data, technology and innovation to transform the safety of operations. Organisations are investing heavily in internal digital and innovation teams, building partnerships with external tech providers and supporting research that explores how emerging technologies might improve safety, productivity and sustainability.
But there’s a common friction point. Despite good intent, strong capability and resourcing; a lot of effort stalls before it reaches the frontline and translates to risk reduction and business value. Not because the solutions don’t technically work, but because we aren’t aligned on the real problem we’re trying to solve.
More often than not, this isn’t a technology issue. It's a language and communication issue. An all too familiar problem that shows up between internal innovation teams, external vendors, the research community, safety and risk teams and those planning and executing the high risk work.
Each stakeholder group plays a role; communicating in different terms, working to different timelines and agendas and ultimately struggling to find common ground.
Same Work, Different Language
If you sit in on conversations between tech, research, ops and safety, you’ll often hear each group frame the same challenge in totally different ways:
● Researchers try to bring rigour and evidence, and often frame problems in academic terms that don’t easily translate to site-based understanding.
● Tech teams (both internal and vendor) talk in technical terms that are often hard to decode.
● Operations speak from experience; based on constraints, resource pressures, risk trade-offs and production context. But they have their language too; the language of operations and maintenance full of nicknames and abbreviations.
● Safety teams, despite being meant to bring it all together, often come with their own acronyms, frameworks and regulatory language that isn’t always helpful.
Take a term like Digital Twin. Everyone claims to have one; and apparently everyone nods and agrees about what a digital twin is… But definitions vary wildly depending on who you ask. Some talk about real-time simulations. Others refer to 3D visualisations. Some think it’s about system modelling, others think it’s just a dashboard. Meanwhile, the people the digital twin solution is meant to serve may not even know it exists, let alone see value in it.
This isn’t semantics. It means time, money and energy get spent on tools or pilots that don’t connect with the reality of work. Worse still, it leads to frustration and missed opportunities to solve real safety and operational challenges.
Innovation Can’t Stay in the Lab
Across industry we’ve tried to solve this issue with innovation labs. We’ve built tech hubs, digital centres and research partnerships to explore what’s possible. These are important. But too often, ideas get stuck in these environments; never quite landing in the messy, complex world of actual operations. Some may say this is where ‘innovation goes to die’.
Part of the problem is that we expect operations teams to define use cases without the time or support to do so. Or we extract one person from site to “represent the workforce” on a tech pilot, expecting them to speak for hundreds of diverse roles, tasks and risk profiles.
Even when problems are identified, they’re rarely framed in a way that a tech team can act on or a research team can study. And that’s before you even get to implementation and adoption where translation becomes even more critical.
A Role That’s Missing: The Concierge
This is where I believe safety professionals can play a more strategic role; as translators for change. People who can connect the dots between strategy, research, technology and frontline work.
Think of it this way: a hotel concierge connects people with solutions. They translate need into action. They navigate complexity and remove friction. That’s exactly what’s missing in many mining innovation efforts.
Safety professionals are already embedded across departments. They understand risk management and they are naturally engaged with all key stakeholders from the frontline to senior leadership. And they’re often involved in every major change initiative, even if only peripherally for the inevitable risk assessment.
With the right mindset and some targeted upskilling, safety teams can become translators; helping to frame challenges clearly, broker conversations across functions and guide technology and research efforts toward real operational value.
They don’t need to be engineers or data scientists. But they do need to understand enough of the language to bring others together; and enough of the risk context to keep everyone focused on what matters.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Let’s say a pattern of high potential near misses is emerging around mobile plant interaction. Instead of jumping straight to another awareness campaign, a capable safety concierge could:
● Partner with ops to unpack the real work conditions and contributing factors;
● Translate this into a well-formed challenge statement that resonates with both tech and research teams;
● Help scope appropriate technology responses — such as AI-enabled alerts, geofencing, or computer vision — with input from users;
● Coordinate trials and feedback loops that build trust and demonstrate impact.
That’s translation in action. And it’s a capability every major organisation should be investing in.
A Shared Challenge — and Shared Opportunity
This a call to action for safety professionals. It's also a challenge to everyone working in high-risk industries. If we want technology to meaningfully reduce harm and improve how work is done, we need to stop operating in silos and we need to speak a common language focused on human-centred problem solving.
Researchers need better access to operational insights. Tech teams need real, grounded use cases. Operations teams need time and support to articulate their challenges. And safety professionals need to become better connectors, not just compliance experts. Because if we can’t communicate clearly across domains, we’ll keep building systems that don’t scale, research that doesn’t land, and innovations that solve the wrong problem.
At APCOM, I’m looking forward to learning from the deep technical presentations, the cutting-edge research, and the many diverse perspectives across the mining, research and METS communities. The program is packed with complex challenges and bold ideas; and my aim is to explore how we better connect those ideas to the realities of work. Innovation often lives in the tension between disciplines. We don’t need to all speak the same language. But we do need to understand each other.
Bio: Cam Stevens is a Chartered Health and Safety Professional and technologist specialising in digital safety transformation. As founder of Pocketknife Group, he works across high-risk industries to bridge the gap between research, technology and operational reality. Cam will be speaking at APCOM 2025 on the role of technology and safety in shaping the future of mining. https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronmstevens/