Aronnax: Hunting with Newton

Now this past week I was in Turku in Finland. The city is home to the Navigate conference and exhibition, and it was here that I was moderating the ninth Intelligence Hunt competition.

This is a unique competition that brings together shipping and maritime companies with groups of students who come together for three months to work on and  solve challenges given them by those companies.

In this ninth competition, seven companies gave challenges to seven teams, each team has an experiences mentor to guide them. After working on their challenges for two months, they came to Turku to present their challenges and their solutions in front of an industry Jury who had to decide on a winner.

I was invited to moderate the day and I got to hear from the seven  groups of students, who had challenges ranging from a port seeking new business, a drone company looing to expand its business model, two projects took on the future fuel of shipping challenge, while another was focused on cyber security,

But the winning team was that which was given a challenge from Finnish companies Meyer Turku, a shipbuilder, and the technology company Wärtsilä.

Their challenge was to look at the development of a clean cruise ship from a life cycle perspective. A somewhat difficult challenge if only that this is something the while cruise industry, shipbuilders and architects are trying to solve, but have not yet done so.

In this interview I talk to three of the six team members from Team Newton about what it was like to take part in such a unique challenge and to get their views on being students entering an industry under transformation,

So I sat down with three of the six students from the team who were at the event for the wards announcement to ask them about their work, and about their tak e aways after taking part in the Intelligence Hunt