Innovation in the Danish Maritime Industry - value creation between academia and industry

On October 9 2015, ATV held a seminar at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) on Innovation in the Danish Maritime Industry. During recent years, many maritime research and education activities have been initiated. Since 2010, ATV has taken part in initiating some of these activities with funding from The Danish Maritime Fund. The next step for ATV was to take stock of the development until today and look into and discuss new innovative needs, opportunities and possible actions in the Danish Maritime Industry. This was the agenda of the seminar "Innovation in the Danish Maritime Industry - value creation between academia, industry and public sector".  

Observations from the seminar: 

• During the last five years, collaboration between industry and knowledge institutions has been strengthened. This is a good platform to build on to start more research and innovation activities.
• Industry today is facing management demands to keep costs at a minimum due to hard competition. This is a barrier for investing strategically in innovation.
• There is a need for education which involves both classical maritime competencies and new disciplines like automation, digitalization and sustainability.
• At the seminar, eight technological areas were named which can help transforming the maritime industry in the nearest future: Shipbuilding, propulsion and powering, smart ship, advanced materials, big data analytics, robotics, sensors and communications (data transfer).
• An important condition for creating innovation is to transfer new knowledge  between industry and academia. At the seminar some examples of this happening was mentioned, but only to a smaller degree. There is therefore an important need to facilitate more collaboration between research institutions and industry.