• David Kristensson, ceo and co-owner of Northern Offshore Services (Sweden), has developed a business concept for the transportation of crew and light equipment in high-speed catamarans to and from offshore wind industry. Established in 2008, the company currently employs over 150 people and operates a total of 19 multipurpose, high-speed catamarans. NOS has offices in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark.
• Morten Christophersen, Miriam Wennberg, David Knutsen (all pictured, l to r,) Magnus Eikens and Stian Magnusson, the founders of Connect LNG (Norway), are commercialising simple solutions to enable LNG terminals. They provide an innovative yet simple loading and discharge system for transferring LNG/LEG/LPG between ships and onshore terminals. Their technology solves what they describe as “the bottleneck in the LNG value chain” - the large costs associated with building an efficient infrastructure for LNG worldwide.
• Boyan Slat, founder and ceo of The Ocean Clean-Up (Netherlands), was diving in Greece in 2011 when he came across more plastic bags than fish, and wondered: why can’t we clean this up? He has since devised a system with an array of floating barriers to catch and concentrate the debris in order for it to be efficiently extracted from a platform. Already $2.2m has been raised through “crowdfunding” towards an aim of cleaning up half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 10 years' time.
• Thomas Aunvik (pictured) and Kenneth Thunheim founded Envirex (Norway) based on their extensive experience in the fields of hydraulics, machining and mechanical engineering. Envirex offers highly skilled workers and competence to guarantee state-of-the-art solutions for the engineering, manufacture, design and service of hydraulic tools and systems. The company boasts a large product portfolio of rental products through subsidiary Envirent.
The judging panel also gave a special mention to four “best of the rest” nominations that very nearly made the shortlist:
- John Marinos Papageorgiou and Dimitris Andrianopoulos of TruckBird
- Alison Jarabo-Martin of Fathom
- Matan Peled of Windward, and
- Mark Broster of ECDIS Ltd.