BackKey Latvian maritime actors gathered to generate project ideas tackling current challenges
Main actors in the maritime domain of Latvia gathered for a one-day workshop in Riga February 27th to generate project ideas for future research and innovation projects, tackling current challenges and creating tomorrow´s solutions. The session resulted in six concrete project ideas that were further elaborated and defined in terms of objectives, potential partners and activities as well as potential funding.
Policy Area Safe and Ship’s Project Idea Generation Workshop concept aim to bring together key actors from the maritime cluster to commonly discuss current challenges and how these can be solved with research and innovations projects – as joint cross sector initiatives has been proven a successful way to tackle maritime challenges. The workshop brought together actors from a wide range of organizations that exchanged ideas, sparked collaboration possibilities as well as discussed continued cooperation in the Baltic Sea Region in the future. The participants originated from 21 different organizations in both academic, public and private sector, for example Riga Technical University, the Ministry of Transport, LSC and representatives of the ports of Riga, Ventspils and Liepaja.
Before lunch, the participants worked in three groups bringing up the most urgent challenges their respective organization face and would be keen to solve through innovation projects. The project ideas were then presented to the full group who voted for the six best ideas, which were further elaborated in the afternoon session. The project ideas selected were:
• Green shipping corridors in Latvia
A project to investigate the Green Shipping Corridors status in Latvia and form the Best Practices-approach to be implemented in the project to follow-up this project.
• E-Fuels
A project that creates a legal framework supporting and attracting long-term investment in E-fuels to improve the sustainability of Latvian maritime sector.
• Research on surveillance of maritime cables
A project to bring together authorities and responsible parties for a common procedure and data compilation.
• Maritime education for the future of maritime
A project to attract young people to the maritime industry. A compilation of ways to provide interesting studies and practice possibilities.
• Improved dredging operations and reduced environmental impact
This project aim to enable on dredging in an environmentally friendly manner and learning from best practice in ports with similar conditions, it investigates if dredging material could be used in alternative ways compared to today considering legislation and coastal zone management.
• Drones for VTS, remote pilotage & bathymetric measurements
This project idea aims to enable navigational safety, remote pilotage, Vessel Traffic Services and environmental control with Unmanned Aerial Systems and Unmanned Surface Vehicle. The project idea build on two current projects with drones and wants to take these results further with more stakeholders and applications.
The project idea generation workshop was enabled by the Freeport of Riga Authority and Latvian Maritime Union, in cooperation with the Policy Area of Maritime Safety and Security (PA Safe) and the Policy Area on Clean Shipping (PA Ship) within the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region. This Latvian event marked the last one in a series of Idea Generation Workshops, which have been held in each of the eight Baltic Sea Region countries during a three-year period. The workshops have resulted in a large number of project ideas being generated and the maritime stakeholders being brought together with the possibility to step out of every day matters to commonly tackle industry challenges and discuss common solutions that could materialize through cross-sector and cross-country collaboration enabled by EU funding.
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