OZ Minerals chief Andrew Cole urged mining companies to build a culture where people wanted to innovate to solve problems and look to collaborations outside their industry.

Cole said miners needed to give more authority to "challenge the status quo" and help members of their own workforce realise that while they might not have the answers yet they could look outside industry for problem solving opportunities.

And they should also be prepared to fail.

"We [executives and higher management] have been trained through universities and our careers to just consider right and wrong solutions," he said.

"The right answer is probably not in the room, it's probably outside of the room. And potentially in a different sector."

He said miners needed to start by creating a culture where people wanted to recount and "not be judged for not knowing the answer to a problem".

One of the challenges OZ Minerals faces is getting to zero emissions.

Cole said the company was looking outside its own boardroom for answers.

"We don't mean net zero, we mean actual zero emissions," he said.

"We could be net zero tomorrow by buying carbon credits, but we're not. It doesn't fix the root cause of the problem which takes a substantial re-think of how we view the world."

Cole said OZ Minerals would deploy new technologies and renewables along with battery storage to reach this goal and had worked with outside mining equipment, technology and services providers and other miners to work out how to implement the plan.

"The idea didn't come from inside OZ Minerals," he said.

"It came from opening up our environment up and asking people with all sorts of different experiences on how to do this.

"Industry have to change their systems underneath … the culture … to collaborate with individuals with new technology and new thinking. Because we don't want the IP, we want to use the technology, but our core business is not in IP."

Cole warned that industry would struggle to achieve "true transformational change" such as decarbonisation without further collaboration and "letting go" of IP concerns.

"Industry have to open up a lot more and create cross collaborations between organisation up and down the supply chain," he said.

"I'd like to see this opened up outside the resources sector. There's a lot of technology available in other industries."

Coles views were shared by METS Ignited CEO Adrian Beer, who told the Austmine conference the resources industry was looking inwards for answers when technologies and solutions were already developed outside.

Beer said the mining industry was on the verge of transformation at a very rapid pace with new technologies.

However, it was getting technologies from other industries into the mining sector that would be integral to this change.

"Mining companies should look to engage vendors differently," Beer said.

"They should approach and tell vendors the problems they have, what they need to buy from them and how it needs to be delivered.

"So rather than vendors coming up with technologies to solve problems that may not exist, they're coming from a more informed space."

According to Beer the pace of technology development was so great the mining industry needed to open up to get help.

"We run a mining reference group where we ask if people had a magic wand, what would they want and technology do you wish you had access to," he said.

"Just about every answer we get from this group, is already technically solved. The problem was that not everything was commercially available."

By that Beer means in some cases the technological fix had been developed, it was just not getting to market.

He suggested miners engaged researchers directly and investigated their work while offering funding to speed up development.

Beer said there was research "dying to get out" from universities and one of the main problems was funding this research and turning it into an actual product.

He argued it was the mining companies and METS providers that should be engaging the raw talent and offering incentives to get this technology developed.

However, it should also be more readily available to others within the industry.

"Miners and vendors are not going to cannibalise the market by working with a competitor to improve their products," Beer said.

"You're actually increasing the market to you and the partner your working with … you can have co-opetition and work with them to increase the total market size.

"I say this with urgency, with technology changing rapidly, it is really important for future collaboration."