MSE is a sector consortium for the marine industries, established in 2005, to stimulate investment and growth of the regional marine and maritime industries, particularly within high-growth market areas such as maritime logistics, marine energy, resource management, environmental management and security. The principal activities of MSE fall into three categories which are; facilitating companies’ investment in innovation by improved access to technology, skills and market intelligence, forging new relationships to help companies gain market access particularly in emerging maritime market areas and promoting the capabilities and interests of the marine industries and their supply chains to Governments and policy makers.
Contact person: Simon Powell sp@mseuk.org
Website: http://www.marinesoutheast.co.uk/
Role of MSE in COLUMBUS
Work Package Leader for Work Package 6. Competence Node Leader for Maritime Tourism. Providing support to Competence Node on Monitoring and Observation. Participating across the project in Work Packages 2 to 8.
Profile of staff engaged in the project:
Jonathan Williams is the CEO of MSE. He is a Chartered Mechanical Engineer (FIMechE, FIMarEST) with a doctorate in mechanical engineering and has specialist skills in consortium-building and definition of novel business models. He has 8 years’ experience in marine and offshore industrial engineering and project management in the offshore energy industry, 4 years’ experience in innovation policy development at a London-based think-tank, 10 years’ experience leading an innovation management company operating at the university/business interface and 8 years’ experience creating and leading Marine South East.
Simon Powell is the Operations Director and a founding member of MSE. Simon has extensive experience of managing UK and EU collaborative projects, to stimulate innovation within the marine sector, generate growth, improve competitiveness and boost profitability. He leads MSE’s interests in maritime transport, logistics and security. Simon’s understanding of the maritime sector was developed during a varied 18 year career as a professional seafarer. He has served as a submarine warfare officer and a merchant navy officer in a wide variety of ships and conducted new build warship sea trials.
Dr Brendan Webster is a widely experienced leading research scientist, systems engineer, business development manager and consultant working in maritime engineering and logistics contexts. He has also been a local politician with a focus on leisure, tourism and the environment. Of particular relevance to Columbus are, his experience in the design and delivery to learning in scientific and engineering fields; as business manager, working with universities in the design of courses to meet the needs of the System Engineering industry; working as adviser (senior business fellow), in facilitating quality improvement and industry liaison, in the delivery of learning to industry at the University of Southampton; and as an elected politician (portfolio holder), fostering of leisure and tourism industry in an English coastal town. Working with Marine South East he has taken particular interest in matters maritime and logistical. Functional objectives have included the facilitation of knowledge transfer and the assessment of technological innovation.
