Connekt in Latvia during the official State visit

Together with several members Connekt traveled to Riga to join the seminar ‘Get Connected’ focused on sustainable ports and smart mobility. The seminar was organized by Connekt in partnership with the Dutch embassy in Riga, the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA) and Freeport of Riga. This seminar was being held in honor of the Dutch state visit.

The seminar was kicked off by introduction speeches of the minister of Transport of Latvia and Mark Frequin from the Ministery of Transport in the Netherlands: ‘we are not competitors but excellent cooperation partners. Only by assisting & supporting each other, we can achieve full progress in transport & logistics’.

Victor Schoenmakers, Director Corporate Strategy of the port of Rotterdam and Ansis Zeltins, director of Freeport Riga acknowledged similarities in digitalization challenges between Riga and Rotterdam ports. The port of Rotterdam is helping the Freeport Riga with their strategy plan for the upcoming 10 years. Besides the digitalization challenge, Victor Schoenmakers mentioned that the biggest priority in the Port of Rotterdam is the sustainable development.

After the panel about rail concepts for the future, where they mainly discussed the need for cross border collaboration, Machteld Leijnse, chief Program Officer at Connekt introduced several company usecases on sustainable logistics and smart mobility. Mischa van den Berg, supply chain manager DIS at Refresco was happy to introduce the Lean analytiX method for calculating co2 emissions and measuring their carbon productivity. Mischa invited everybody to join the Lean & Green program.

Koenraad Verduyn, director new mobility at PTV was able to build a bridge between sustainable logistics and smart mobility by drawing attention to data; ‘having data is just the beginning, what you do with the data adds the intelligence to act’.

Jan van der Wel, CEO Technolution gave several example of what they have accomplished with traffic management data to make cities more livable.

Connekt had the opportunity to discuss the outcome of the seminar with His Majesty, King Willem-Alexander and the Dutch minister of foreign affairs, Stef Blok.

After the seminar, we were invited to join the VIP networking diner hosted by our Latvian partner, LIAA, where we met several businesses and universities.