The World Class Supplier Program for mining in Chile: Assessment and perspectives

The World Class Supplier Program, Programa de Proveedores de Clase Mundial, is a recent private sector initiative to strengthen innovation and collaboration between large firms and suppliers in the mining sector in Chile. The goal of the program is to develop innovations in domestic suppliers to provide technological solutions to specific problems detected by large firms and to sell them at a larger scale in international markets. This paper analyzes the evolution of this unique program and its prospects for the future. The program seems highly innovative and relevant as a tool for the development of suppliers but limited in size as to produce a substantial impact in the economy. Despite being successful in achieving its goals of creating technological solutions to large firms, the scaling up and internationalization effects of the program seem small. This is a result of the incentives facing large firms and providers. That is, while it is in the interest of large firms to collaborate with providers to develop solutions for their operations, they did not seem to have incentives to collaborate in the scaling-up and internationalization of providers.