1627 industry and has already served as inspiration for parallel cooperation activities with other industry representatives. During the last four years, the Epiroc University-Company Chair has delivered specialized conferences and seminars, machinery donations and study trips, for students, teachers and researchers reaching already over a thousand impacted professionals in the mining sector. On the other hand, the Chair has offered Epiroc Peru, along the dissemination of their technology, the opportunity to promote innovation in thematic areas necessary for the development of the mining industry. The opportunities developed around such collaboration go beyond an academic exchange. As an example, Peru is probably the best test bench to analyse and improve the performance of mining equipment at extreme altitude conditions, since this country has world-class mines, both open pit and underground, at altitudes that exceed 4,000 meters above sea level. In summary, the University-Company Chairs contribute to the development of training, dissemination, knowledge transfer, research and innovation activities and arise from the need to maximize the relationship between the university community and its future work environment. This model of collaboration is an excellent instrument to formalize and create long-term collaboration agreements, in one or more domains of knowledge, between higher education institutions and companies or entities with the major goal of fostering knowledge transfer from theory to the praxis, bridging the gap between the academic offer and the skills demanded withing the company's workforce. 4. THE HUB AND SPOKES APPROACH Building on the success of the initial model, Epiroc expanded the collaboration to Peru, conducting activities over three years. Later, as the network grew, the Ibero-American Hub and Spokes Approach was established to developed collaboration, covering four countries, Spain, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. One of the major activities was the online lectures of the Epiroc-University Chair in 2023, involving 24 Peruvian universities, 7 educational institutions, and 10 global mining companies. The network positively impacted 993 students across 7 Latin-American countries. Figure 1 – Effect of iron concentration on the amount of precipitate formed during hydrolytic precipitation from waste processing solutions The Hub and Spokes model is a collaborative framework which principal advantage is that permits a rapid expansion for the collaboration between different universities and the company avoiding doubled efforts and optimizing resources. The last is mostly relevant, when considering mining countries as Peru where the number of mining schools can be more than 20 universities. In this model, see Fig. 1, a central hub university coordinates with various spoke universities, industry partners, and institutions to facilitate a wide
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