It is the best of times; it is the worst of times.
For the first time in the history of the container shipping industry, billions of dollars are pouring into countless new and existing companies in an attempt to digitally transform SeaFreight. An industry that began in 1956 with the innovation of the first container ship is poised to move forward in new ways.
The pace of idea-generation and innovation is accelerating.
The problems targeted by this wave of investment are obvious. SeaFreight lags behind other analogous industries in its ability to provide basic services like shipment visibility or the ability to clearly cost out a shipment. The push to decarbonize the industry is now in full swing but some technology needed to accomplish the goal is still in the laboratory. Limitations that have been in place since the industry began remain major impediments to the objective of providing customer-centric, cost-effective, carbon-neutral global SeaFreight transport.
This is a fundamentally challenging situation. Basic technology building blocks are not in place to facilitate productive innovation. And a lot of the investment promising to change this is not guided by industry leaders or industry experts. Industry outsiders are looking to ‘disrupt’ without really understanding current and future constraints.
We think that SeaFreight needs a platform to allow current industry leaders to steer innovation toward value-creation. We need a platform that allows different parts of SeaFreight to work in collaboration to create new solutions to intractable problems. We need a platform to facilitate new ways to innovate our way to a better tomorrow. We need something different.
That’s SeaFreight Labs.
We believe that the best response to this turbulent situation is to complement existing innovation efforts with open-innovation. We offer a "Project Advisor" set of services to support our clients in their open-innovation efforts. These include coordination, facilitation, promotion and support services to help drive each challenge to its most impactful outcome. This role allows us to proactively prevent common errors of beginners to the process of crowd-solving while also helping the team do effective internal project planning and management.
Committed to the Pledge-1% Movement
We believe that business is a powerful platform from which to make a positive impact on our communities
As part of the Pledge-1% movement (www.pledge1percent.org), SeaFreight Labs commits to donate at least 1% of its product/service to global non-profits to aid their work on humanitarian issues.
Read our press release here. Check out our webpage on our support of humanitarian non-profits here. A number of our blog posts talk about how this pledge has transformed our company. You can browse just the Pledge-1%-related ones here. Two short videos about the 1% movement are below. Join us in the movement!
SeaFreight Labs was founded by Harry Sangree, a long-time technology innovator with 35 years of experience in SeaFreight and global trade. Harry has held multiple senior management positions at 3 different SeaFreight-related technology companies that have introduced numerous innovations benefiting thousands of global companies and tens of thousands of end users. SeaFreight Labs leverages Harry’s career-long passion for technology-based innovation.
As an individual, Harry was the innovator of many impactful SeaFreight technology solutions including OceanSchedules.com, INTTRA-Desktop and the Syntra Global Logistics System (GLS™).
Harry was interviewed in the "Dartmouth Engineer". Read the article HERE.