Following another hugely successful Mining and Innovation Research Battlefield, we talked with 2025 winners Lisa October, Diana Kasymova and Resoketswe Manenzhe, whose project and plan wowed the judging panel and secured them the 2025 Innovation Grant.
This year’s MIRB asked competitors to respond to the challenge:
‘What are the innovative and sustainable solutions for revolutionizing tailings management, and how can these be applied to achieve zero harm while supporting a more responsible and circular mining economy?’
Now the dust has settled on the competition, we were eager for updates on the winning project.
Q. How did your project answer the challenge about tailings management?
A. You cannot think tailings without considering water, you cannot separate the two! There’ve been many academic and industrial attempts at dealing with the solid part of tailings, but the water is often overlooked. Not only do we need to do something with that water, it can be better used during the processing to improve production of any material, whatever the intent for the tailings – repurpose, re-use or storage.
Q. Tell us about your MIRB experience?
A. Although we often put together research proposals and make many presentations, this competition required us to pitch with a commercial focus and really sell with impact — and that’s a new and different skill set for us. So, it was difficult in the beginning to package our pitch to meet the criteria, but it was a great learning experience and the environment was very friendly and supportive of that. Having these new skills will definitely be helpful for the future.
Q. How long have you been working on this project, and what was the reason you wanted to enter MIRB?
A. This project was spawned in April 2023 from several other long-term projects, so although it is quite fresh, it had already evolved somewhat as a result of trial and error in other related projects. Metso Technology Director, ProfessorKari Heiskanen got involved and was the advocate for entering, backed by the comfort of previous UCT representatives doing well in the competition. So, we said, “let’s do it!”
Q. As an industry/academia collaboration, how was the MIRB competition different to other competitions or challenges you’ve experienced?
A. The application was significantly simpler than a normal grant process and we enjoyed the opportunity of turning it into a sales pitch rather than begging someone for money. It meant we were able to get creative and make it fun.
Academia tends to think that their work is so important, but industry doesn’t always want to hear that – they want to be shown – so it’s like getting validation from the outside world that what you’ve been working on for so long is, in fact, important.
Having a live final round at Mining Indaba was also very valuable in terms of networking with the other entrants, the sponsors and the wider conference of many potential collaborators.
Q. If you entered MIRB again, would you do anything differently?
A. I think we’d go in with the same mentality. The process really shaped our way of thinking about pitching with impact, so learning that in practice was very important. One change we would make would be including cost estimations at the very beginning in order to illustrate the monetary value of the project. This is very important for industry, so you can’t overlook it!
Q. What’s next for the project? What will the innovation grant help to fund?
A. Likely in the next year we’ll recruit a new Masters student to help with the fundamentals – from our understanding, water quality within the system needs to be explored further to enable pilots. Our understanding and experience only goes so far where that’s concerned. Then, we’ll need to find a new industrial partner alongside Metso to gather data.
Q. What advice would you give to the next cohort of MIRB entrants?
A. For the pitch itself, get down very quickly to the ‘so what’ of it. It’s very easy to overload with information, so simplify it as much as possible. The audience doesn’t have your level of deep expertise, so use simple language and keep it interesting – don’t bore people with excess detail.
Time management is also very important to explain what the problem is within a quick 5-minute pitch. Finally, lots and lots of practice – we had our teammates to practice on and gauge their reaction; people who know the subject matter are great to practice with and help you to notice what you might have overlooked.
Interested in the other finalists for this round of the Battlefield? Read our 2025 Alumni Magazine.
We are already looking ahead to the 2026 Mining Innovation and Research Battlefield! Stay tuned for updates on the next challenge.
