Promotion of green maritime technologies and new materials to enhance sustainable shipbuilding in Adriatic Ionian Region

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The maritime industry has always been a key economic sector in Adriatic Ionian Region, providing thousands of high skilled jobs and opportunities for SMEs and larger enterprises such as shipyards. These days the shipbuilding industry in Europe faces fierce competition coming mainly from Turkey, S. Korea and China, where shipbuilding capacity has grown exponentially. Ship construction has also been deeply affected by the lack of effective trade rules at global level and the absence of investment initiatives. The collapse in demand since 2008 had a severe impact on employment in this sector as well. NEORION aims at establishing a transnational Cluster in the Adriatic-Ionian on Green Shipbuilding that will accelerate both the cooperation of key actors & innovation in the industry. NEORION is expected to reinforce the traditional shipbuilding sector through coordinated efforts that will facilitate the exploitation of innovative technologies and technology transfer between new complementary markets such as new materials & specialized vessels. As main outputs, the project aims at enhancing the innovation capacity of the sector, creating a sustainable shipbuilding ADRION cluster, developing tools to favor the cooperation of SMEs with research institutions and provide action plans to both foster economic growth of the sector and benefit the regional business ecosystem, through actions targeted to and initiated by representatives of the Quadruple Helix. NEORION aims at exploiting joint assets of the participating countries to eventually create a transnational innovation system for Green Shipbuilding. We argue that since Shipbuilding constitutes a major sector of EU’s Blue Growth Strategy, transnational cooperation is needed to boost the performance & accelerate the EU market towards new & innovative ones. Expected impact is the creation of an ADRION Cluster that will maximize growth potential, synergies & the diversification of the Shipbuilding market.

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