IMarEST Lord Kelvin Lecture
Attendance is free for all, but registration is compulsory. To register for this event please contact events@imarest.org – with your full details. Please note places are limited and early registration is strongly recommended
1730 hours Refreshments
1800 hours IMarEST Lord Kelvin Lecture
1900 hours Drinks reception
In the early 1830’s a fully laden sailing ship leaving from Great Britain would take approximately five weeks to cross the Atlantic. Then in 1838 Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s new steamship the Great Western made the voyage in just fifteen days.
Shipping 1.0—the age of sail—lasted over two thousand years. The Great Western’s voyage was the first of a new era—shipping 2.0—which has lasted less than two hundred years. Built on fossil fuels, economies of scale, mass consumerism, globalisation, and improved communications Shipping 2.0 has been defined by the advent of steam, radio, and containerisation. In shipping 2.0 the experience of building, sailing and operating ships was profoundly different from that which had gone before, but the change to shipping 3.0 will be even greater. Shipping 1.0 was sail, Shipping 2.0 was steam, and Shipping 3.0 is digital.
The transition is already well underway. DNV GL recently unveiled the ReVolt concept ship, unmanned and battery powered, and by 2018 Rolls-Royce anticipate they will have their first fully autonomous prototype ship capable of unmanned operation. By 2025 fully automated ships will be entering the market, ten years later many types of ship will be delivered with autonomous operation capabilities, and by 2050 segments like container shipping could be fully automated and unmanned.
The icon of shipping 3.0 will be the unmanned ship, but to focus solely upon it is too narrow. Shipping 3.0 represents a far greater set of challenges than a move to autonomous ships and unmanned operations. A variety of exponential, converging trends including artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics, the industrial internet, 3-D printing, maritime satellite connectivity, the circular economy, collaborative consumption, crowdsourcing, and the rise of the Millennial generation will transform shipping for ever.
Volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, shipping 3.0 will require all our ingenuity, nerve and resilience to navigate successfully, and the current generation of shipping and maritime leaders have little time to prepare.
Information about our speaker: Trained as a naval architect, Roger Adamson came to the attention of Inmarsat whilst completing his PhD on Inmarsat-C. Recruited to run Inmarsat’s Training and Worldwide Partner Programme he worked with PTTs and solution providers globally before leaving to join IMC as Managing Director in 1999. As one of the co-founders of the innovative maritime e-procurement platform Setfair.com Roger then ran its maritime data solutions business, Rydex Corporation as Chairman and Chief Executive. Following a period of consultancy Roger joined strategic maritime market intelligence specialists Stark Moore Macmillan as CEO in 2008, where he restructured and rebranded a company already recognised for its leading-edge data, interpretation and strategic insight, adding new multi-platform publishing activities focussed on future technology, to create Futurenautics, a business which occupies a unique position within the maritime industry. Wholly independent, the Futurenautics web portal and quarterly magazine are free resources dedicated to identifying relevant technology trends and contextualising them for the shipping and maritime industry, which has been described as ‘Shipping’s Economist’. In addition Futurenautics runs a rolling programme of in-depth, high-quality maritime market research producing ground-breaking studies and results against which the industry benchmarks itself. The company also provides strategic consulting to organisations considering entering the maritime market or acquiring maritime businesses, reviewing and analysing existing and proposed offerings. Roger is a frequent international speaker and regularly contributes his significant expertise on a voluntary basis to a variety of maritime industry associations, serving as an advisor to InterManager, the international trade association for the ship management industry, as Chairman of IMASMA, the International Maritime Sales & Marketing Association, and as Co-Chair of the Global VSAT Forum Maritime Satellite Group. Roger is married to the novelist and maritime futurist K D Adamson with whom he has two daughters, and lives by the sea in Dover, UK. In his spare time he is an accomplished maritime artist.
