Seeking new horizons with Wilhelmsen

Wilhelmsen’s vision is simple yet mighty – shaping the maritime industry. Against a backdrop of marine digitisation and new business models, they are proving their pedigree as industry leaders through a game changing innovation approach and award-winning digital products.

Founded in 1861, Wilhelmsen are renowned in the shipping industry, but with a culture prefaced on staying one step ahead this global maritime group never rest on their laurels. Our collaboration with Wilhelmsen Ships Service wasn’t just about developing new ideas, but ensuring the Ships Service Business Unit had the capabilities to turn them into reality.

Wilhelmsen Ships Service brought us in to help them digitise a predominantly analogue portfolio of products and services and unlock new growth. To do this, we focused on building internal innovation capabilities, whilst in parallel applying our venture methodology to test, validate and launch new propositions.

Innovation requires investment without the promise of immediate returns, and that demands bravery. However, like many industry leaders, Wilhelmsen are committed to learning through doing. They spun up a co-staffed innovation team with us and at the same time had that team ideate, test and where appropriate build innovative solutions. Their committed approach and shift in mindset led to the development of one of the shipping industry’s first Classification Society certified IoT products dedicated for boiler systems.

The idea for this product came from our exploration of how to improve the performance and lifetime of boilers within ships whilst reducing the cost of man hours spent on maintenance, and improving safety by minimising the risk of adverse events. Together, we built a prototype for a fully automated boiler management system using high temperature sensors to measure chemical levels in the water. We prepared an algorithm to work out how much of each chemical was needed and automatically dosed the system. This idea also gave Wilhelmsen an opportunity to explore how they might sell via subscription models to develop ongoing relationships with customers.

In this case, it not only took the development of new internal capabilities and an innovation mindset to come up with disruptive ideas, but also the strategic expertise to know which ones to take forward and the technical skills to turn them into tangible new products and services in market.

Together, we:

• Spun up a co-staffed venture team with Wilhelmsen appointing a Venture lead, Tech lead, and Business Model lead, which we mirrored on our side.
• Applied our Venture methodology to run an ideation sprint and support them in validating the key uncertainties associated with the desirability, feasibility and viability of different venture ideas.
• Brought in the expertise of data scientists, technology architects, engineers, and hardware experts to help build a fully functional MVP for Wilhelmsen’s first venture - an IoT boiler system solution designed to automatically manage the condition of the boiler water within optimal parameters. Together we built the prototype in three months.
• Upskilled the wider business with a training programme for the whole organisation, drawing down on our venture methodology and combining this with our shared learnings from the ventures we were testing. We ran sessions that covered ‘developing winning customer value propositions’, through to ‘designing business models’.
• From strategy to build, we established a truly collaborative culture across the project to ensure we delivered real value to the client, its shareholders and its customers.

The impact has been bigger than anyone initially imagined, both in terms of the immediate impact Wilhelmsen’s first venture has achieved, as well as the pervasive innovation culture that now runs throughout the organisation.

Following a successful MVP, Wilhelmsen have since paused the boiler IoT product given the industry’s readiness at the time, however the process triggered a wider move to an innovation mindset, organisation structure and a corporate venturing framework that has grown multifold since then. This has provided a new impetus in developing revenue streams via ventures for Wilhelmsen, whilst focussing on addressing pain points for its customers.

Wilhelmsen’s internal innovation capability has gone from strength to strength, collecting industry awards such as Seatrade, Safety@sea, Lloyds List and the Royal Institution of Naval Architects safety award across a number of their ventures. Their appetite to break new ground continues to grow. Today, they have established a joint venture for 3D printing to build components and in some cases use drone technology to get these delivered to the ports where their clients need them. As part of their in-house venture program, they have ventures in material circularity and the emissions space. Wilhelmsen have also expanded their corporate venturing suite to cover the full spectrum of internal venture building, open innovation industry collaborations and external early stage venture capital investments. We can’t wait to see what they do next.