Maritime innovation is a contact sport. It's not for everyone.

Antwerp, Belgium - September 22th, 2025

By Michiel Mol, Managing Director at Made

Global shipping is changing fast. AI, IoT, and modern comms are rewiring how ships, fleets, and ports operate. Sustainability targets are pushing cleaner fuels. Supply chains are being rebuilt for shocks. Yet, innovation at sea is still a contact sport. It’s not for everyone, but it is for Made.

Let me explain.

Shipping moves roughly 90% of world trade. Consequently, marginal gains in efficiency, safety, or emissions equals tremendous impact. From an innovation studio point of view, that’s a big challenge. At the same time, it’s a huge opportunity for driving meaningful innovation with lasting impact, which is exactly what gets us on the edge or our seat.

If you look at global shipping from outside, Maritime looks like the perfect playground for bold “out of the box” ideas. At Made, however, we look at it differently.

Bold? Sure.
Out of the box? Not so much. And here's why.

In a maritime context, a ship is actually a box. A floating one. A regulated one. One that runs in salt, heat, cold, vibration, and never-quite-perfect connectivity. Innovation that works in these conditions must be shaped from the inside out. Not from the outside in.

If the new idea doesn’t fit the box from day one, it doesn’t last day two. This isn’t stubbornness. It’s physics, safety, and compliance. When problems arise and the box braces itself for impact, solutions must fit instantly within these constraints. There’s no room for guesswork or untested ideas. It’s a luxury maritime just doesn’t have.

Early summer, I travelled to London to visit Jeremy Daoust, Vice President Product Incubation at (LLoyd's Register) OneOcean at the time. We’ve been working together on a number of innovation tracks in recent months, and we took some time to talk about the future of maritime.

Well, Jeremy put it well.

This is where we as Made have earned our right to play in recent years. We’ve established a track record in the maritime industry rooted in the belief that digital solutions will fail fast at sea if they’re not grounded in operational reality. And with stakeholders ranging from crew and shipowners to regulators and port authorities, “moving fast and breaking things” simply isn’t an option.

Maritime innovation requires extensive industry knowledge. It’s a recipe to build trust, and that’s exactly what sets Made apart from traditional consultancy.

Like I said: maritime innovation isn't for everyone, you know?

In maritime's rich history, blunt innovation has led to a large series of pilots and prototypes that never made it past the trial stage. Insiders will know.

Our expertise in maritime innovation, however, has taught us that the difference between a project that sinks and one that transforms comes down to one thing basically: alignment with the real needs of the people who use it.

Safety and compliance matters.

The CII and other IMO measures aren’t slideware. If a solution can’t evidence compliance or improve carbon intensity math, it becomes shelfware.

Harsh operating reality.

Sensors foul. Bandwidth drops. Power budgets matter. Design for intermittent data and noisy signals or your model will drift.

Complex stakeholders.

Crews, owners, charterers, ports, class, regulators. If a tool helps one and hinders three, it dies.

Pilot purgatory.

Lovely demos, no operational fit. If it doesn’t remove work, it becomes more work. The best maritime products I’ve seen don’t add tech for tech’s sake. They unlock what’s already there: the ship, the data, and the people.

Minimum viable workflow, not minimum viable product. ‍

Solve one painful job to be done. For example, cut duplicate noon-report entries and harmonize with logbook data. Save bridge time. Prove value in a week, not a quarter.‍

Context-first data.

AIS, engine logs, weather, and maintenance data only matter when stitched to the voyage plan and operating envelope. No context, no adoption.

Trustworthy AI.

Start with explainable models for things like fuel deviation or ETA prediction. Keep humans in the loop. Audit the recommendations. If the chief can’t see why, they won’t use the what.

Measurable outcomes.

Tie features to hard metrics: minutes off admin, percentage improvement in CII score, verified fuel savings on comparable legs. If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen.

Over recent months, we’ve been working closely with Jeremy Daoust and One Ocean / Lloyd's Register on multiple innovation tracks to create exactly these winning patterns.

Within this collaboration, we are blending deep operational understanding with the ability to turn ideas into digital products that work from day one. These innovative solutions will be designed to give the right people the right insights at exactly the right time, but always with full context.

No context? No shipping.

From cutting down manual record keeping to developing trustworthy AI-powered predictive vessel models, the focus should always be on building this solid, future proof backbone for maritime operations that is trustworthy from day one. Together, One Ocean / LLoyd's Register and Made will continue to work closely on driving maritime innovation forward, to achieve clear business goals.

And yes, I’m excited to take these solutions to market soon.

Maritime innovation is not for everyone. Maritime innovation is not like anything else. Maritime innovation is not about thinking outside the box.

Maritime innovation is about knowing the box. The hull, the people, the routes, the constraints, the paperwork, the weather window, the fuel budget.

Maritime innovation is built from the inside out. It only ships what fits. It only measure what matters. It earns trust every day, from day one.

As an innovation studio with many years of experience in global shipping, we succeed at driving meaningful solutions that don't just float. They carry weight and free up mental capital.