Ivan Ladan discussed with Leonardo Zangrando, the CEO of Startup Wharf some basic steps we made during the last months to enable the technologies to the medium size vessel owners and vessel managers.
Over the last couple of months we’ve spent some time making research about marine startup ecosystems trying to understand why in 2020 we still are so far from all of the surrounding sectors with innovation cases, investments and new unicorn stars.
The case is about the mindset of the majority of the stakeholders as usual. Big-size companies are big because initially they made a lot of innovations, not in IT, but in operations, the scalability of sales, the way they manage employees, the way they work with the clients, and nowadays having big budgets they trying to gain knowledge and muscles in IT, hardware, deep tech and etc. It’s an expensive long term journey with lots of failures, lots of burned out budgets and some important experience somewhere in the next 5 years that to develop IT you should have the IT mindset. Such contribution is obviously made for internal business profitability - PR and branding also part of it, all of the industries similar in that logic and all of the financial ecosystems, insurance and some other progressives passed that stage 4-8 years ago.
If we dive into the medium size segment and small size segment of the marine industry - you will be surprised how ancient it is in terms of the mind set and available or explored by the industry platforms, the way of thinking towards smart solutions in opposite to the well known but not technological.
This gap is getting bigger over time, the Majors are getting technologically advanced, the medium and small guys in general are lacking the knowledge where to find such innovations, how to implement and actually how not to take all the costs by themselves.
The Sea Traffic Management initiative (STM validation) is only 5 years old. And it’s a progress similar to the launch of the first satellite for the marine industry, but a little bit later than expected.
That's why the StartupWharf for example is doing a great job to match the marine corporations with young IT companies. CEO Marine Digital Ivan Ladan discussed with Leonardo Zangrando, the CEO of Startup Wharf some basic steps we made during the last months to enable the technologies to the medium size vessel owners and vessel managers.
