SPEED
Smart Ports Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Development
Priority Axis
Technological and Social InnovationSpecific objective
Framework Conditions for Innovation
Lead partner
Antwerp Management SchoolContact
Start Date
12/07/2018End Date
30/06/2022Project budget
4 154 162 €ERDF amount
2 457 654 €ERDF rate
59%About
Common challenge
Global competitiveness is putting pressures on Western European ports to be more efficient and innovative. Especially in large and complex port environments there are numerous opportunities for efficiency gains in the logistic chain. Simultaneously, new advances in data science and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are enabling more efficient ways to communicate and integrate entire supply chains. High-tech start-ups and SMEs are leading the way in these technological developments. Currently, port environments do not fully take advantage of data science / IoT technologies. Further, high-tech start-ups / SMEs often struggle with professionalization of their technological ideas and business activities. As a result, performance of the Western European ports is hampered. Similarly, the full development potential of high-tech start-ups and SMEs and their subsequent economic contributions are not realised.
Overall objective
Main outputs
Cross border approach
Main Achievements
Towards its overall aim of creating the ecosystem conditions for accelerated smart port innovation in the 2 Seas area, SPEED is increasingly creating an impact and generating spontaneous interest in the European - and global - smart port community. Even despite Covid, our network is growing, as is the interest in the innovation portal from WP1, the smart port webinars, the smart port maturity model and ecosystem audit methodology from WP 3B. Meanwhile, work packages 2 and 3A are gearing up to introduce the technical and business model tool kits for smart port entrepreneurs they have been developing en we're looking forward to finally organize the twice postponed smart port conference in September 2021.
Beyond the deliverables promised, the project's activities are also stimulating follow-up innovation and research projects. As a testament of our impact on moving the innovation mindset in ports: after the ports of Portsmouth and Antwerp, we're now also in full prepration of 2 more open innovation challenges for monetary prizes with ports outside the consortium: Zeebrugge and Northsea Ports.
Yet, despite these promising results and the optimism being built towards innovation among the consortium and the smart port stakeholders it engages with, SPEED's mission builds on the frequency and intenstiy of engagement with the stakeholders. So, in this sense the project's activities have been substantially impacted by the inability to meet physically in 2020, especially with regard to how intense we would like to engage with the target groups.
Especially the more intensive support foreseen in the development stage and after, in piloting and delivery, are heavily impacted and will require that constraints on physical interaction are relaxed in 2021.
As an indirect consequence, reaching the 950 users of the innovation support throughout the innovation project lifecycle is becoming challenging, yet the introduction of the tool kit (O4), the smart port conference (D 5.4.1) are expected to be significant drivers of recrtuiùent and engagement. Hopefully a relaxation of Covid measures against physical meetings should also provide more engagement opportunities, as especially the more intensive engagement events (hackathons & physical meetings) always cause a spike in registrations.