Spotting the right opportunity in a European Consortium

We were very excited last year when we joined the Sea Traffic Management (STM) Validation project as a latecomer.

The STM is a big European consortium focused on smart maritime traffic management, co-funded by the European Commission and big shipping companies. Following the first few week of excitement we started to dig deeper in the project itself, to understand the long term vision, the available technology, and the progress so far.

STM is an ambitious and versatile concept that is offering solutions for all stakeholders relevant to a vessel's voyage from marine port A to B. Ranging from weather monitoring, ship tracking, route planning, to port operations and land side logistics.

Originally, we had been invited on board thanks to our skill set and expertise in Geospatial and Smart solutions, though we wanted to go beyond that. For an emerging young tech business, like ours, it is crucial to create ever more use cases and thereby validate our technology and business model further and further. Therefore, besides our general consulting role, we wanted to see if and how we could apply our own solutions either as supplementary, or through integration into the main framework.

By the way, for less established tech brands this is a good trick / tip, so far it has been working for us well. To start a conversation like that with the coordinators we had to find a strong commercial use case that either adds more value to the existing concept as a whole, or straight to the individual end users who are shipping companies and ports in our case. In other words, we had to find a yet unfilled gap and address that both with technology and commercial projections. On its own that is challenging enough. But to unlock that in a large consortium of over 40 partners is almost mission impossible.

We turned last week’s consortium gathering / conference in Tallin to our advantage. Our CEO imprisoned himself for 3 days in the same hotel where the conference took place. He has not seen any of the city, just meeting after meeting, conversation after conversation. He mapped the project’s progress, collected valuable feedback and concerns from the end users. The frosty weather, minus 20 Celsius at daylight, helped to keep everybody inside. He identified the right people to talk to, then he used all opportunity for conversation: in the middle of sessions by triggering open debates, and even in the evenings in the hotel bars.

And BINGO! We have initial interest and discussion with the port authorities. Our opportunity to apply is not on sea, as we originally thought, but in the ports. And we indeed can introduce new solutions that will help reduce ship turnaround time further. The hard work finally pays out. We hope our example can serve as a guideline for other businesses in similar situations. There is always more opportunity under the surface, and the way to discovery is through conversation to the right people. Urban Hawk is a Geospatial Data Intelligence business that changes raw data, collected in Smart environments like Smart Cities, into commercial intel.