SmartPort Community Lunch meeting April 19th, 2016

Location: T09-67 Mandeville building
Time: 12.00-13.30
Presentation by Bart Kuipers (EUR/RHV B.V.) and Walter Manshanden (Netherlands Economic Observatory).

 “What we told Jeremy”

At the moment, a team of international researchers led by the American futurologist Jeremy Rifkin is working on a transition of the Rotterdam The Hague Metropolitan Region into the Third Industrial Revolution and The Next Economy. The Third Industrial Revolution is based on the coming together of the Communications Internet with the Energy and Logistics internet in a seamless intelligent infrastructure: the Internet of Things (IoT). The port of Rotterdam however is the champion of The Second Industrial Revolution, a revolution based on the discovery of oil, the invention of the internal combustion engine—the automobile became the ‘engine’ of the Second Industrial Revolution—and the introduction of the telephone. An economy based on oil belongs to the past. July 2008 was the moment were The Second Industrial Revolution peaked and crashed, with an oil price of $147 a barrel, a crash directly related to the beginning of the Great Recession, according to Rifkin. The Second Industrial Revolution was very important for the port of Rotterdam. A giant petrochemical complex emerged, closely related to a world scale refining complex. The handling of the raw materials of the Second Industrial Revolution—coal, ore, oil, oil products, chemicals—made the Port of Rotterdam the most important port in the world in the 1962-2003 period, very important for the Rotterdam identity. Also, for a very short period, Rotterdam was the largest container port in the world and still is by far the largest container port in Europe.

What should the Rotterdam port community do, with the decline of the Second Industrial Revolution expected and the Third becoming more important every day? Bart Kuipers of RHV and Walter Manshanden of research institute ‘Netherlands Economic Observatory’ present the vision of Rotterdam stakeholders and researchers presented to the team of Jeremy Rifkin as a first important input for their transition advise. In the lunch lecture of April 19, Bart and Walter will present what they told Jeremy on the state of the art of the port of Rotterdam. The report can be obtained here.