3 Maritime Innovation


Efficiency through strategic cooperation

Ask yourself three simple questions:

  1. Is your company big enough to afford all costs associated with the innovation steps you want and/or need?
  2. Is your company still outpacing the speed of developments outside your company, or is it becoming difficult to keep up with those external developments?
  3. How many big companies have disappeared and how many have grown to be big in the last 2 decades?

In a mature market, companies have to compete for resources and (as Kodak, Nokia, Blackberry and others have experienced) competitors may come with nasty surprises. Where were Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet 20 years ago, where was the digital camera, the smartphone, the connected with everything and anywhere?

Any company should be aware that it operates in a jungle with many hidden threats. The first step to deal with that is to realise that however big you are, there are always threats you will not be able to coop with. The second step is to realise that nature has many examples how to trive in a jungle so learn from those. The two approaches that offer a better chances on survival are ‘strategic cooperation’ and ‘always learning’.

Strategic cooperation in this context is about seeking partners who are willing to define a mutual long-term development strategy, partners that each have something value to contribute to the others and that have each something they lack that can be provided by the others.

PK Marine has extensive experience in setting up joint (national and international) innovation projects. With that, she has learned, sometimes the hard way, about relevant success factors. Some examples are Bridge2000, Rudder-Roll Stabilisation, HSF-Arcos, Retrofit and Zeeslag.

Together with various partners, PK Marine is involved in the field-lab initiative at the RDM campus in Rotterdam to realise a community of cooperating partners that each for their own reason are interested in participating in joint innovation with as main theme UxVs. Start-up companies, education & knowledge institutes and established companies join their forces to achieve what neither of them can achieve on their own.

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