Pioneer Portal

Whether you are an individual inventor, or represent a small business or listed company, after submitting your idea, a mail response will acknowledge your submission and you will be contacted by us again within 2 months.

We need:

• A clear, concise description that conveys the nature of the innovation
• The unique features and benefits it offers relative to existing solutions
• The status of your intellectual property

Supporting documents can be attached when completing the form. Please remember that all information submitted must be non-confidential.

For more information, please refer to the 'What you'll need to provide' section higher on this page.

Patents and other forms of intellectual property are used to establish ownership and protect the legal rights of the owners of various kinds of innovations and works. For your own protection and ours, we may decline to review your open innovation submission if it appears to lack intellectual property protection.

We cannot advise you on if you should pursue a patent, design or other form of intellectual property protection. For more information regarding the nature of intellectual property and its uses, you may wish to consult your legal representative or appropriate government agencies.

Please first describe your innovation without disclosing any confidential information. If we have interest in learning more, we will contact you to establish the necessary agreements.

Our initial review is based wholly on the non-confidential information you provide in your open innovation submission. Face-to-face meetings, phone conferences, or live demonstrations are not usually required at this stage.

It can take up to two months for our initial review to be carried out. If we need additional information during that period, we will contact you.

We therefore ask that you be patient and not contact us about your submission.

Each innovation is posted onto our internal social networking tool, Yammer, for open review by the Rio Tinto community. Additionally, these are reviewed by an expert panel who determines how to route it to ensure it reaches the relevant people within our company. In many cases, this can mean review by several parts of the organisation to evaluate technical merit or strategic business fit for us.

We are committed to reaching a decision as quickly as possible, however a thorough initial review, especially of a technological innovation, may take up to two months to complete.

Compensation is an important component of any business transaction. The value of an idea will be determined in discussions between Rio Tinto and the party which controls the rights to the intellectual property and its practice. Each property is therefore evaluated on its own merits and as a result, there is no standard amount.

This could take a variety of forms, depending upon the specifics of the innovation and both the potential partner's and our needs, including a licensing or supply agreement, or other type of collaborative venture.

We understand that those submitting to the open innovation portal desire feedback, including the reasons why we may decide to decline an opportunity. However, we are usually not at liberty to give detailed reasons. Generally speaking, submissions are most often declined for one or more of the following reasons:

• The proposed solution is already known to us
• We already have work in progress in the area covered by the submission
• The opportunity is not a strategic match with where we want to take our business or brands
• The size of the opportunity does not fit with our business plans
• There is a lack of protected intellectual property associated with the submission

Rio Tinto will use this information to communicate with you about your submission. It will not be used for any other purpose, nor will it shared with any third party.