”The aim of the MERIT project was to find ideas for new start-up companies,” says Dr. Ulla Tapaninen, expert of maritime logistics for the City of
Helsinki. Photo from SLUSH fair 2016.
”The entire Finnish maritime cluster
has been awakened to the dawn of digi-
talisation and ICT solutions – not just in the
Helsinki region, but throughout the coun-
try. For instance, many companies situated
around the city of Oulu in the north have
been quite active in the MERIT project.”
”While not restricted to marine inno-
vations, the annual SLUSH fair will carry on
in MERIT’s footsteps, with the potential of
becoming the new maritime ICT business
forum. Also, EEX Maritime Oy has kept up
“
Making use of
big data is
a crucial issue.
encouraging maritime start-up companies crucial issue for future marine cluster busi- be repaired before they become serious.
and promoting technological innovations ness projects. Also, ship-specific data is needed for new
in the maritime industry.”
”Transmitting various types of tech-
nical data via satellite from ships to shore
generations of remote-controlled and
autonomous vessels,” says Tapaninen.
NEW CHALLENGES FOR for analysis has been quite expensive up ”Such data can also be utilised for
THE MARITIME CLUSTER to now. However, the costs of data trans- finding ways to improve the energy-effi-
Dr. Tapaninen says that making use of big mission are lower these days. This makes ciency of ships. This will result in ecologi-
data – that is, huge volumes of telemetry it feasible to collect and analyse data, per- cal solutions. It will also save the shipping
data and other maritime information – is a haps finding technical problems that can companies a lot of money.” n
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