Among Lighthouse's members from industry, academia, institutes and society, there is now also a classification society. “Lighthouse moves Swedish shipping forward, and as an international player we want to both participate and contribute and receive feedback and input to our operations”, says Mikael Johansson, who leads DNV's maritime advisory department in Sweden.

There have been discussions for some time about DNV becoming a member of Lighthouse.

#But we haven't really had the capacity. DNV may be a large organization, but our Swedish branch is relatively small. Now we have become a little bigger and we have the opportunity to participate in Lighthouse with the commitment required.”

According to Mikael Johansson, DNV wants to be a voice within the Swedish maritime cluster and becoming a member of Lighthouse – Sweden's collaborative platform for maritime research and innovation – is a good way to participate in the discussion.

“We also want to be able to pick up important and current issues within Swedish shipping and take them further within the discussions that are conducted overall within DNV.”

Cooperation is of course nothing new for DNV. The classification society is a member of many groupings and also runs its own networks in various segments internationally.

Are there collaboration platforms equivalent to Lighthouse in other countries?

“I don't think there is anything that looks exactly like Lighthouse with a connection to the academy. However, we also collaborate with academia and research in our major markets, for example in Norway, Greece and Singapore”, says Mikael Johansson.

He continues:

“The advantage of Lighthouse is that academia and industry are brought together so that you can tie together the R&D development and make sure that everyone pulls in the same direction. It's important to have your ear to the rail to find out what everyone has on their agenda.”

What are the most important challenges shipping has to work with?

“At DNV, we work a lot with the digitization issue and the decarbonization. These are of course two big questions for both Swedish shipping and world shipping. I believe that there is great potential for Swedish shipping and Swedish suppliers of equipment to be at the forefront of this development. But we have to take advantage of that. The discussion of a changeover has been going on for a long time in Sweden, other actors are quickly catching up. So it's super important for us to be able to maintain our edge. It costs a lot of course, but could in return provide jobs and technology and competence exports