BCBusiness

July/August 2021 - The Top 100

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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For Seaspan, the main benefit of Novarc's technology wasn't filling a shortage in skilled labour—it made the company much more pro- ductive. Hebson considered other solutions that might have brought a 10- or 15-percent upgrade, but none came close to the step change Novarc delivered. "This is a several-hundred-percent improvement in terms of productivity," he marvels. Hebson describes the changes that has brought to his business: "We've been able to walk prospective customers past the machine and show them the quality that comes out. It's also allowed us to be able to be more competitive in terms of the price and schedules for customers with large pipe installation jobs. So that certainly helped us to secure a number of jobs over the last two years." Novarc continues to improve its machines by making them smarter. Its current welding robot records and stores video and data for shop analysis and quality control. Future upgrades will include artificial intelligence–enabled vision systems that will gather informa- tion from fleets of robots so the machines themselves detect errors, learn to make better decisions and learn how to learn better. "When you have this kind of computational power, and with the right algorithms, you can actually exceed the capabilities of humans," Karimzadeh predicts. "They can learn many times as much as one human could have learned in one lifetime—in a span of days." C h a r t i n g o u r o w n c o u r s e This province's ocean industries likewise need to keep grow- ing smarter to build on the progress started over the past decade. Almost every jurisdiction with a seashore aims to build an ocean or blue economy cluster, with government, academia and businesses of all sizes working together for greater effect. MacDonald of Canada's Ocean Supercluster sees Iceland, Germany and several U.S. states charging forward. Norway, however, is the blue economy whale—an economic and technological leader. The Nordic country's ocean industries created 680 billion Norwegian krone, or some $100 billion, in value in 2017. Offshore oil and gas production generated most of that, while the maritime transport and seafood industries contributed 200 billion kr, or about $30 billion. Those foundational sectors fuel innovation in areas like green shipping, offshore wind power and sustainable aquaculture. "They've had a very clear ocean strategy that they consistently deliver on, and that drives their investment decisions and innovation activities," MacDonald explains. North Vancouver–based International Submarine Engineering ( ISE) helps illustrate how history and culture might steer different clus- ters to different outcomes. ISE has been designing and manufactur- ing autonomous and remote-controlled submarines (AUVs and ROVs), along with other subsea tools and technologies, for four decades. Its early customers included navies from Canada, the U.S., France and Japan, which bought the ROVs for salvage, recovery and survey work. Canada's Department of Defence used one to recover human remains and hardware from Swissair Flight 111 after it crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998. Norway's Kongsberg Maritime is one of ISE's biggest competitors. Its parent, Kongsberg Gruppen, founded in 1814, also has roots in the defence industry, having made rifles for the Norwegian Armed Forces in the 1800s. During the 1970s, though, the company began develop- ing technology to tap the newly discovered North Sea oil fields. Luke Alden, a mechanical designer for ISE, estimates that Kongsberg sells three or four times as many AUVs as his company does. Most of those carry sensors for sur- vey work in the offshore petroleum sector— a large, lucrative niche that ISE rarely taps. Instead, its subs often work on scientific projects, for institutions like Memorial Uni- versity of Newfoundland and the University of Southern Mississippi. "Our subs tend to do the cooler stuff," Alden says proudly. "Like, we've sent two to the Arctic with the Canadian government. We built one that went to Antarctica." Alden explains why the two businesses hook different customers: "They knew exactly what the oil and gas companies are looking for, right? And that's what's been harder for us to get. Whereas understanding what scientists want, it's a lot easier for us." So B.C.'s marine technology companies won't look like those from Norway, Japan or even Newfoundland, despite many shared ambitions. They'll each have to build on their own strengths and find their own lanes to success, whether they're starting from a shipyard in Burrard Inlet or a kelp bed in Barkley Sound. n In a business-as-usual scenario, the global ocean economy will double in size to some $US3 trillion in value by 2030, according to one forecast Maritime and coastal tourism Offshore oil and gas Port activities Marine equipment Fish processing Offshore wind Water transport Shipbuilding and repair Industrial capture fisheries SOURCE: THE OCEAN ECONOMY IN 2030, OECD 26% 221% 16% 10% 9% 8% 3% 4% <1% JULY/AUGUST 2021 BCBUSINESS 121 BCBUSINESS.CA Industrial marine aquaculture W o r t h I t s S a l t 2%

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