Goldcorp found gold by publishing its mine data online

Goldcorp's Red Lake mine in Ontario had a rich, decades-long production history, but by the late 1990s output had fallen to around 50,000 ounces a year and the company's own geologists could not agree on where the remaining gold actually was. Red Lake's geology was famously stripey and hard to model, and mining convention held that a company's core survey and drilling data — the exact record of what lay underground — was among its most closely guarded assets, never handed to outsiders, let alone rivals, for free.

CEO Rob McEwen, after hearing how Linus Torvalds had used the open internet to let outside programmers improve Linux faster than any single company's engineers could, faced a choice: keep funding the same internal team working the same proprietary data, or open the data itself to whoever might see something Goldcorp's geologists had missed. Every competitive instinct in mining argued against publishing raw exploration data — it was the one thing standing between Goldcorp and a rival buying the claim outright.

Posted proprietary survey data online with a prize for drilling targets, uncapping analysts to anyone on earth and paying only for actionable results.

Publishing raw data let outsiders apply methods geologists lacked, like 3-D modeling from a graphics team.

Prize paid only for actionable targets, so 1,400 analyses cost less than a few years of one team's salary.

Legal control of the claim meant outsiders spotting patterns couldn't stake it themselves, so secrecy was safe to drop.

When internal experts stall, open the underlying data to outsiders and pay for answers, not hours.

More than 1,400 entrants from over 50 countries — including geophysicists, graduate students, military analysts and consultants who had never set foot in a mine — downloaded the data and submitted target coordinates. The winning entry came from an Australian graphics team that had never seen Red Lake in person but built a 3-D model exposing patterns the site's own geologists hadn't flagged.