New business ecosystem brings together global forerunners and agile ICT start-ups to develop first autonomous shipping solutions in the world.

Empowering the digitalization and harvesting effectively its benefits is priority area in the Governmental Program of Finland. Digitalization has also a strong role in the development of the competitiveness of the Finnish maritime cluster. Autonomous maritime ecosystem is a concrete action of Finnish digitalization strategy and Finnish Marine Industries envisioning.

The aim is to provide world's first unmanned maritime products, services and vivid ecosystem by 2025. As a part of the ecosystem, the Ministry of Transport and Communications is committed to enable testing of autonomous vessels in Finland in a flexible manner.

The players in the business ecosystem include global leaders like Rolls Royce as well as numerous innovative ICT companies.

Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, is committed financing autonomous marine ecosystem development and boosting new innovations into markets in the coming years.

"We are especially enthusiastic about colliding our world class ICT start-up scene with strong maritime players. New networks will boost exchanging ideas and create pioneering community for intelligent shipping", says program manager Piia Moilanen from Tekes.

In practice, the initiative will create a common roadmap for reaching autonomous marine operations and enables effective co-operation and coordinated development between industry, research institutes, class societies and authorities. The roadmap creation and implementation is steered by a group of leading industry partners.

DIMECC as a team leader

DIMECC Ltd acts as the ecosystem manager and is responsible for the achievement of effective co-operation and concrete objectives between the players.

DIMECC is the leading co-creation platform with a target to speeds up time to market. DIMECC's network consists of 2.000+ R&D&I professionals, 400+ organizations, 69 shareholders and 10+ co-creation facilitators. DIMECC's shareholders contain the leading maritime, ICT and software companies.

Tekes - the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation is the most important publicly funded expert organisation for financing research, development and innovation in Finland.