Motivation

Maritime industries are promoters of growth and help to improve quality of life within coastal regions. It is important to recognise the wider economic importance of maritime industries and services for the European economy and citizens as a whole (MPGP). Ninety percent of global transport is carried out by the shipping industry, with forty percent of the global fleet based in Europe. As such, sea transportation plays an important role in logistics chains.

With markets becoming increasingly global, tariff barriers disappearing and more information based economies, the maritime industry and its related sectors are in need to newly emphasise innovation, competency and collaboration. The possibility to manage and develop knowledge as a strategic asset is a key ingredient seeking short-term returns and to assure long-term competitive advantages. The potential to learn, collaborate and innovate faster than one’s competitors becomes the sustainable source of competitive advantage in the emergent knowledge-based society. To stay competitive, companies need to capitalise on their intellectual assets, rather than infrastructure.

The maritime sector in the North Sea and Baltic Sea Regions is facing a lack of well trained personal. There exists new and significant rising demand for education and qualifications which enhance the innovation capacity within the sector so as to benefit from the predicted growth rates in the maritime transport sector. In future, maritime business managers need to be better prepared by possessing multidisciplinary knowledge and skills set to cope with growing maritime traffic, port development, and rising environmental challenges, all within an intermodal environment. In consequence, adequate qualification offerings must reflect the underlying needs of the maritime industries, one of the most globalised of industries.

Against this background, multidisciplinary qualification offerings for maritime business management will benefit greatly from exploiting the diversity, complementarities and synergies that exist between maritime expertise and content across a range of international universities. Expertise in specific aspects of the maritime sector already exists at several centres of excellence housed within universities in the North Sea Region. This broad range of knowledge and expertise needs to be harnessed, connected and gathered within a common and lasting network of universities which specifically and directly addresses the needs of potential beneficiaries of the qualification offerings that will be formulated.

The "Northern Maritime University" (NMU) will meet these challenges by building up a strong transnational network of universities in the North Sea Region (NSR) which intensive and continuously integrates relevant stakeholders from the maritime business sector. The existing expertise of international partners in the NSR will be pooled to provide exactly the described multidisciplinary and internationally oriented qualification offerings.