The president of Ports of the State, José Llorca was in charge of pronouncing the closing conference of the VII Conference of Innovation in the Port Cluster that was held in Santander and was organized by Ports of the State, the Port of Santander and the Valencia Foundation Port. The meeting had the collaboration of the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP) and the University of Cantabria (UC) and the Sponsorship of Portel.
On this day, more than 80 professionals have attended in various disciplines related to the port area, who have discussed new models related to maritime transport and ports. The round tables have had a total of 15 speakers who have participated in each of the three sessions in which the meeting was divided: sustainable ports, smart ports and infrastructure optimization. The fourth session, which was entitled ‘Innovation in the framework of Spanish port policy’, was the conference given by the president of State ports.
During his speech, Clorca said that "changes in maritime transport in recent years have been very large and will continue to be." In this regard, he explained that the ports have evolved in governance, giving more and more participation to the collaboration of the private initiative. He also said that most of the R&D projects have concentrated on infrastructure, although, he added, "after the world crisis has changed, because Spanish ports no longer have great needs in this area." For Llorca, innovation now has to be aimed at achieving more efficiency and competitiveness, so that Spain does not lose traffic or its current role in international trade.
The president of Ports of the State made a criticism of the system by pointing out its difficulty in generating global planning policies, this being one of the weaknesses of the Spanish ports. In this regard, he assured that "we must gain in effectiveness to have more capacity without increasing infrastructure." The objective according to Llorca is "to get more competitive, efficient and cheap ports." And at this point he described initiatives such as the cluster as tools to boost the system and achieve the objectives set.
Finally, Llorca referred to the need to detect R&D projects and be able to carry them forward, either with exclusively public resources, or through public-private collaboration.
After the conference of the President of the State, the official closure took place, in which Cristina López, director of the port of Santander; Arturo Monfort, R&D Director of the Valencia Port Foundation; Juan Enrique Varona, Vice Chancellor for Institutional Relations of the UC, and Sebastián Coll, Vice Chancellor of Internationalization of the UIMP.
Cristina López, who had also intervened in the opening of the day and at the round tables, said that "innovation is a key factor to grow, in addition to a strategic priority of the ports." According to the director of the APS, the port system has located the areas in which it is necessary to apply creativity and, he added, "advance in innovation means advancing in the search for solutions of the detected problems."
Arturo Monfort wanted to make clear the need to support and boost innovation; In this regard, he stressed that "the port system must go in a group, be efficient and articulate projects that improve technical and economic efficiency." For his part, Juan Enrique Varona referred to the need for interrelation between research and innovation, connection between universities, social agents and public and private entities, and interdisciplinarity. In this regard, he pointed out that these factors occur in these days of the cluster, where all these characteristics are.