BackSaving the Sea, one challenge at a time: PA Ship & Safe Project Idea Generation Workshop
One of the best ideas we under the Policy Areas Ship and Safe have had, is to arrange onsite workshops for project Idea Generation across the Baltic Sea countries. These have acted as little innovation nests for local maritime stakeholders, where we have first recognised problems and challenges they, or their sector is currently facing, and then went on to come up with ideas for projects to address these challenges.
There is usually a reason why a problem, or challenge, is one: it is not easy to tackle, which is why it remains one. In our case, several of the maritime sector challenges are related to – unsurprisingly – to environmental and/or safety issues: securing critical infrastructure; chemical weaponry buried in sea bed; regulation and standardisation concerning alternative energy; dark fleet; jamming of GPS… The challenges are plenty.
Challenges into solutions
Fortunately, one of the great features of our workshops is, that by inviting participants from the many corners of maritime sector, there is always a deep-end expert of the subject matter in presence; therefore the discussion does not remain in “we should be doing something about it” -level, but can proceed to actual “this is what we should be doing” -level. Consequently, in the end of these project idea generation workshops, we have, as the title suggests, multiple project ideas available for taking.
The latest workshop was arranged in Gdynia, Poland in mid-October in the beautiful Maritime Academy of Gdynia. The local organiser had carefully curated a list of invitees to ensure we had the most appropriate and relevant participants from the local maritime sector.
In addition to a brief introduction to the EUSBSR, the PA Ship and Safe Coordinators provided an overview into the policy areas’ work and EU funding instruments available.
The participants were then invited to arrange themselves into small groups where the actual magic in form of project brainstorming took place.
And what was achieved? Numerous ideas, of which eight were chosen by the groups themselves for further development, and finally six were brought forward as final results of the workshop. One was already picked up by one of the participating organisations to be taken forward for implementation, which we were more than happy about!
Coming soon
The next, and final project Idea Generation workshop will be held in Riga, Latvia in February 2025. It will mark as the last one in the series, finalising the PA Ship and Safe tour of Baltic Sea countries, and set us forward to the next step, which is to connect the workshop participants with like-minded counterparts in each country with the objective of forming transnational projects solving the mutual challenges.
That is the true spirit of EUSBSR, after all.
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