MechChem Africa March-April 2022

Ignite: Imagine the future and bring it to life De Beers Group Ignite™ is now a unified global innovation arm for the De Beers Group, tasked with spearheading corporate and technology innovation initiatives. MechChem Africa talks to Sarandos Gouvelis, head of Incubation, along with Gordon Taylor, head of Commercial Technologies, about this holistic approach to innovation and some of their ongoing successes. D eBeersGroup Ignite™, which inte- grates theDeBeers SouthAfrican and United Kingdom technology and innovation teams, is now one

of theGroup’s core innovationarms, engaging in the full spectrum of innovation activities from ideation and fundamental research, incubation and commercialising of technolo- gies to developing ecosystems, partnerships and corporate ventures. “Under the De Beers Group Technologies South Africa banner we have long been en- gaged in the development and commerciali- sation of technologies for upstream mining operations. You may remember our XRT dia- mond scanning, sampling and sorting system; or our RhoVol advanced density profiling and sorting systemfor determining the density of an ore sample by measurement of the mass and volume of the sample on an individual particle basis,” begins Gordon Taylor, who is now the head of Commercial Technologies for De Beers’ IGNITE team. “De Beers also operated a sister organ- isation in Maidenhead, UK, which, like us, developed proprietary diamond technology:

for sorting and grading diamonds according to size, quality and value, for example; and for thedownstreammarketing and retail side,” he tells MechChem Africa. Following a strategic review in 2019, De Beers recognised the synergy between these two technology groups and the advan- tages of establishing a newand global innova- tionplatformto improve the overall impact of its innovation initiatives, Taylor adds. Expandingon this, SarandosGouvelis, now the head of Ignite Incubation, says a much wider set of synergies was also recognised. “We were operating geographically separate

technology units and standalone hubs that were looking at specific problems such as robotics and technologies in the polishing industries. Then there was a corporate team of about five people who were developing De Beers’ corporate innovation approach, how we approached new business models across the value chain aswell as newtechnol- ogy ideas and projects that might result in new businesses, ecosystems and ventures,” he continues. “Theoutcomeof the reviewwas a decision to bring the global De Beers Group closer together from an innovation perspective,

The XRT Coarse Concentrator Plus incorporates an on-belt detection x-ray transmission sorter.

20 ¦ MechChem Africa • March-April 2022