Three months later – did we rock the industry?

Our Rainmaking teams were referred to as “Cargotec’s garage band” in a news article published after the launch event in May. I thought this was both humorous and genius, as it sums up perfectly the nature of the programme. Instead of fancy words and settings, the intent was to simply roll up our sleeves, dig into some raw business cases and get our hands dirty rocking impactful solutions together. We were lucky to find outstanding band members in the form of cutting-edge startups and scaleups – but did we manage to push out list-hit records or was it merely a garage jam session?

You can be the judge of that question, but personally I am really excited with the progress of many of these projects. As always in new business development, some projects are left on hold at some stage of the funnel, or ended with a bagful of learnings to show for it. Some are instant hits, while others become late bloomers only after further development. We ended up with all the mentioned scenarios, of which I wanted to share some highlights.

One of the most obvious matches in the programme was the partnership between Navis and Loginno. Already in June, Navis was part of Loginno’s Contopia competition, where Log-In Logistica was selected as the winner to become the world’s first truly digital logistics company. They also happen to be an existing Navis customer with a wide selection of their portfolio in use. Arming them now with Loginno’s smart container technology provides an excellent test bed for Navis to find actionable insights for the whole container value chain.

An even further developed project is MacGregor’s cooperation with Arundo Analytics. MacGregor’s existing OnWatch Scout solution was taken under joint development, and a significantly improved prototype was launched already in June. Piloting will start now in August, with a customer taking it into use to verify the value of the solution. Already within the short timeframe of our cooperation, the development of OnWatch Scout has progressed more than during the whole previous year.

To include a possible late-bloomer, I’ll bring up Kalmar’s promising cooperation with Cogniac on automating the visual drone inspections of ship-to-shore (STS) cranes. The project team already created a proof of concept and the technology is solid. However, at this point our data for this specific use case is not of adequate quality to turn it into a working solution. Therefore collaboration is on hold - at least for now. Both parties have learned what it takes to take development strides in this area and we have a higher readiness to advance quickly in similar projects in the future.

Other cases in the making have also progressed to proof of concepts, mockups, customer validations and planned partnerships. Some are still waiting for the final verdict on where they will end up at this stage. In any case, our garage band is certainly rocking the industry with innovative, problem-solving solutions. But even more importantly: in showing how collaboration and openness can exponentially accelerate the solving of industry pain points. While we still have a lot of work ahead of us with these ongoing projects, we will soon be on the look for more promising partnerships as the second cycle of the Trade & Transport Impact programme kicks off in September!