The maritime sector is undergoing significant transformation. To enhance Singapore’s hub port competitiveness, the Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA) is leveraging technology to help maritime companies innovate and move into new growth areas.
MPA will be establishing the MPA Living Lab, and working with partners to set up three Centres of Excellence to deepen maritime R&D competencies.
The MPA has also enhanced the Maritime Cluster Fund (MCF) for Manpower Development and the MCF for Productivity, to help Singaporeans up-skill for more knowledge-intensive jobs and maritime companies to adopt technology to improve business processes, respectively.
The MPA Living Lab will provide a technology partnership platform, with sufficient scale and real operating conditions in the port of Singapore, that technology providers and industry partners can plug into for the co-development and piloting of innovations.
Andrew Tan, Chief Executive of MPA, said, “The MPA Living Lab will be the first of its kind in the region and will not only help Singapore to transform its maritime sector into a high technology industry through the test-bedding and development of new systems and capabilities for future port operations but also enable companies to test-bed locally developed solutions under actual operating conditions, bringing these technologies closer to commercialisation and internationalisation.”
MPA will be partnering the Singapore Maritime Institute (SMI) to set up three maritime research Centres of Excellence (CoEs) within local Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs) over the next five years. The first centre focusing on maritime environment & energy will be launched by MPA and Nanyang Technological University by the second quarter of this year.
As business models evolve, there will be greater demand for highly skilled employees with knowledge of smart technologies. To boost the future-readiness of our maritime workforce, MPA has enhanced the Maritime Cluster Fund for Manpower Development (MCF-MD) to include a wider scope of topics for training programmes and longer durations for overseas training attachments.