Kinross Gold Russia: Value Innovation in Arctic Mining
A multilingual, hybrid program helped specialist teams treat one another as internal customers, uncover dependencies and opened a path for internal ownership of the method.
Executive Takeaways
- Value innovation can be applied inside an operating system by treating adjacent teams as customers and suppliers.
- Cross-disciplinary conversations revealed process dependencies, communication improvements and new uses for existing expertise.
- A hybrid, multilingual program gave the client’s internal continuous-improvement team an opportunity to become involved in the tools and facilitation approach.
The client and operating context
Kinross Gold’s Russian mining operations were located in remote Arctic conditions. The sites combined underground mining with a large supporting system that included geology, safety, engineering and repairs, power generation, ore processing, environmental protection, logistics, community engagement, security and site services.
The operating environment demanded long-range logistics planning, disciplined coordination and highly specialised expertise. Staff travelled from several countries and across the Russian Federation to work in multilingual, cross-disciplinary teams.
Individual functions already worked to demanding technical and safety standards. The opportunity was to improve value across the connections between those specialist functions.
The strategic challenge
Kinross Russia wanted an internal continuous-improvement and innovation program grounded in value innovation: pursuing lower cost and increased value at the same time.
This was not a conventional external-customer exercise. The focus was the internal production chain. Specialist teams needed a way to understand how their decisions created value, friction or risk for the departments immediately upstream and downstream.
After a global search for Blue Ocean Strategy and value innovation consultants, Kinross Russia appointed Blue Ocean Strategy Australia to develop and deliver the program.
Designing for a remote, multilingual operation
BOSA proposed a combination of on-site and remote delivery tailored to the operating environment. IdeaScale provided an online collaboration space, including translation functionality, while in-person work created room for deeper cross-functional discussion.
The program ran over three months and included two on-site visits. Selected groups were introduced to value innovation tools and ways of thinking through a combination of English and Russian, supported by on-site and online translators.
The hybrid design allowed the material to be tested against real operational challenges rather than taught as a generic innovation course.
Treating colleagues as internal customers
Participants were encouraged to look up and down the production chain and consider other departments as internal customers and suppliers.
Multidisciplinary teams discussed both recurring challenges and practices that were already working well. That changed the unit of analysis: instead of optimising one function in isolation, teams examined how information, materials, decisions and expertise moved across the operating system.
The conversations exposed dependencies and opportunities that were difficult for individual specialists to see from within their own processes.
Opportunities identified
The opportunities ranged from simple changes in how materials or communications were prepared for handover, through to trials of new technology.
Teams also developed a better understanding of expertise held elsewhere in the operation. That revealed new applications for existing skills when other divisions faced related challenges.
The value of the process was therefore not limited to generating standalone ideas. It strengthened the organisation’s ability to recognise where knowledge, preparation or coordination in one area could improve performance in another.
- Improve the preparation and handover of materials along the process chain.
- Make critical communication more useful to the next internal customer.
- Identify where technology trials could remove operating friction.
- Apply specialist expertise to challenges outside its usual division.
- Expose cross-functional dependencies before they became larger constraints.
Preparing for internal capability
BOSA used the pilot to refine the presentation material and tools against the realities of the mining operation. The process gave the internal continuous-improvement team an opportunity to become involved.
The intended next step was capability transfer: the case study records an opportunity for the client team to take increasing ownership of internal education, coaching and facilitation.
The pilot was designed to provide a foundation for an internal method that could be used across functions and future improvement challenges.
The transferable lesson
In complex operations, each function can be highly efficient while the connections between functions still contain avoidable cost, delay or risk. Internal value innovation makes those interfaces visible.
The practical lesson is to bring the people who exchange materials, information and decisions into the same strategic conversation. Give them a shared method for identifying what can be eliminated, reduced, raised or created — and design the engagement so the organisation can continue the process itself.