The Fundación Valenciaport will offer a new innovation promotion and support service to cluster companies

This new line of business has been announced today by the general director of the Fundación Valenciaport, Antonio Torregrosa, during the ordinary meeting of the board of trustees of the entity.
During the session, the management report and the annual accounts for the financial year 2022 were approved and the members of the board were informed of the activities launched since the beginning of 2023.
One of the highlights of the meeting was the appointment of Salvador Furió, current director of Innovation and Development of the Cluster of the Fundación Valenciaport, as deputy director of the entity.

Valencia, 22 June 2023. – The Board of Trustees of the Fundación Valenciaport today held its ordinary meeting for the first half of the year, at which it approved the management report and annual accounts of the Foundation for the 2022 financial year.

In the director’s report, Antonio Torregrosa detailed the activity carried out by the entity during the first half of 2023, starting, as usual, with the new innovation projects that have been approved since the beginning of the year. These are six projects funded by the Horizon Europe programme: POSEIDON, which aims to facilitate the use of e-methanol as e-fuel in maritime transport; STBERNARD, which will seek to quickly and accurately detect and identify the presence of explosive atmospheres and/or NBC-E (radioactive, biological, chemical and explosive) agents in risk or emergency situations; METEOR, which will develop an innovative portable and non-intrusive technology to carry out container inspections; SMAUG, which will improve underwater threat detection in ports and their gateways; UNDERSEC, which also focuses on underwater security, and will test, among others, underwater 3D scanning Lidar technology; and DISCO, which aims to accompany the digital transition in logistics and urban planning with a “Physical Internet” approach; as well as an initiative financed by the Ports 4. 0 Fund: 5G RADAR, which will ensure the safety, accuracy and control of berthing of any vessel by combining 5G and UWB Radar technologies. In addition, the director expressed his satisfaction with the new success of the H2PORTS hydrogen project, which last Friday received recognition for the ‘Best innovation project in the renewable gas value chain’ at Gasnam’s Green Gas Mobility Summit event.

On the other hand, the director has also informed the members of the board of trustees of the upcoming launch of a service to promote and support innovation in the cluster companies.

In terms of open innovation, Torregrosa presented the 4 startups selected for the first Opentop Startup Acceleration Programme (Canonical Green, SensingTools, DMS Logistics and Gandolapp), which will solve the challenges of the port logistics sector proposed by Boluda Corporación Marítima, the Port Authority of Valencia and Opentop.

With regard to international cooperation, the director highlighted the recent collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for the creation of the Smart Ports Manual, a tool developed to facilitate the monitoring and evaluation of the process of transformation of port enclaves into smart ports by port authorities and terminal operators. In addition, he informed the Board of Trustees of the start of a new technical assistance in Argentina, focused on developing a strategy for the transformation of the human capital of the Bahía Blanca Port Management Consortium. He also mentioned the start of the 1st edition of the Master in Logistics and Port Management in Panama. This programme welcomes, in the classrooms of the Panama Maritime Authority (APM), 22 students from Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama, a Central American edition which consecrates Panama as an international maritime hub. Finally, Torregrosa announced that next year the Fundación Valenciaport will strengthen its reach in both Africa and the Mediterranean.

With regard to the training area, the director highlighted as a milestone the launch of the new Fundación Valenciaport programme for the joint award of the Train Driver’s Licence and the Driving Diploma, making it the first railway school linked to a port. Torregrosa also reported on the smooth running of the 1st edition of the Advanced Vocational Training in International Trade “Port Logistics Specialisation”, as well as the recent signing of an agreement between the Generalitat Valenciana and the Fundación Valenciaport, which converts the experimental training programme – developed by the Fundación Valenciaport – into an official curriculum integrated into the Advanced Degree in International Trade.

Next, Torregrosa informed of the appointment of Salvador Furió, until now Director of Innovation and Development of the Cluster of the Fundación Valenciaport, as Deputy Director of the entity.

Finally, the director informed the members of the board of trustees of the recent launch of the Fundación Valenciaport Report 2022, an interactive document that is already available both on the corporate website and on the organisation’s social networks, and presented the agenda planned for the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Fundación Valenciaport, which will consist of a week of conferences and events focused on the different target audiences of the organisation.

Once again, the members of the Board of Trustees reiterated their satisfaction with the entity’s results and reaffirmed their support for the Fundación Valenciaport project as an umbrella organisation for innovation and training at the service of the port logistics cluster.