Leader's Blog

Can BP Take a Lesson from Goldcorp?

Over 10 years ago Rob McEwen at Goldcorp took an ailing gold mine in the Red Lake area of Canada and did what no one in the gold mining industry had ever done before. He tapped into the intellectual capital of the entire globe.

Intrigued with open source innovation and collaboration, McEwen ran a contest and did the unthinkable. He published 50 years of super secret geological data on the Goldcorp’s 55,000-acre mine in Red Lake. Then, he ran a contest inviting contestants to help Goldcorp find the gold.

Over 1400 people from around the world downloaded the Goldcorp data. The company received 71 proposals from 55 countries proposing to use technology and methods, in many cases, Goldcorp didn’t know about or had never considered.

For $500,000 in prize money, participants found over $3 billion in gold. Now, Red Lake is considered one of the richest gold mines in the world.

What would happen if BP offered $500,000 in prize money and invited the world to help it find a solution to the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico? The Deepwater Horizon well is gushing 5,000 barrels of oil per day one mile below the ocean’s surface. That’s over 155,000 barrels since April 22 when the rig sank.

To BP’s credit it has 400 to 500 engineers working around the clock in a crisis center in Houston to solve the problem. I’m sure these are very, very smart people. But, what if BP had the humility and guts to admit that even its best minds don’t have it figured out?

We know from our research on innovation that the “experts” are often blinded by taken-for-granted assumptions about the way the world works—assumptions new faces from outside the industry don’t make. Perhaps like Goldcorp, BP would discover that someone out there has an idea its engineers haven’t considered.

Radical problems call for radical solutions—from people who aren’t afraid to question the unquestionable. These people often come from the outside.

When Rob McEwen first proposed his radical idea, the experts said he was crazy. They said, “Don’t do it! We’ll be vulnerable. Our competitors will take advantage of it.” Goldcorp fared pretty well and so did its investors. A $100,000 investment in Goldcorp stock 15 years ago would be worth approximately $2.6 million today.

This oil spill is a crisis of heroic proportion. Some say this disaster could be larger than the Exxon Valdez spill and possibly one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. It’s damaging the coastlines, shutting down fishing, threatening fragile habitats and putting entire industries in peril.

Once the problem is solved it will take decades to deal with the consequences. And, everyday the problem goes unsolved; it grows by orders of magnitude. Wouldn’t it make sense for BP to organize an effort that invites the best thinkers from around the world to become engaged?

These horrifying images from the Boston Globe tell the story and build the case for why we should tap into the intellectual capital of the world to solve this problem.