Knowledge

The shipping sector's rising greenhouse gas emissions are often considered “hard-to-abate”. Some ship-owners have recently adopted or started to consider the adoption of alternative fuels, but systematic studies of this are still lacking. We address this gap by studying how ship-owners differ in both actual and intended adoption of alternative fuels. We analyze data from a unique survey with 281 ship-owners in Norway, a major ship-owning country and center for maritime technology development, with descriptive statistics and analysis of variance. We find early adopters among large and established ship-owners in offshore, international cargo and domestic passenger shipping segments, which are often subjected to specific contractual demands for alternative fuel adoption. Laggards were typically small and young ship-owners operating in shipping segments where demands for alternative fuel adoption are weak. Our findings also suggest that firms' business strategy and financial and knowledge resources may have relevance for ship-owner's adoption of alternative fuels. Our study has implications for national and international policymaking, highlighting for example how contracting mechanisms can be an effective tool in incentivizing the adoption of alternative fuels.

In this video, Matthew Spaniol (Aarhus University) presents the interim results from the Interreg vb North Sea PERISCOPE project, a foresight study that involved scanning the horizon from the bird’s nest to identify the innovations that will impact the blue economies in the future, and the accompanying forecasting results that timestamp when in the future the innovations are expected to become commercially available. The session was developed in collaboration with MARLOG.

This book explores the transformation of Danish shipbuilding from 1975-2015. Specifically it expores the closure of B&W Shipyard in 1980, Nakskov Shipyard in 1986, Aalborg Shipyard in 1987-88, Burmeister and Wain Shipyard in 1996 and Danyard Frederikshavn in 1999. The author identifies 27 firms that were spun out during the closure of five Danish shipyards and finds that several of these firms were able to apply the inherent resources in new activities with more value added. The book also finds that the competencies of the redundant workers from the four shipyards were useful in other parts of the Danish labor market. The book sheds new light how internal and external factors influence the transformation of mature industries.