Tallinna Sadam has won one of Estonia’s top innovation prize – and its ambition goes beyond ports: the company is now building a new business line around exporting its digital expertise to ports worldwide.
Estonia does not reserve innovations only for its startup sector. This week, Tallinna Sadam, the Estonian port operator, has been named the winner of this year’s Tippinnovaatorite (Top Innovators) programme – a competitive eight-month initiative run by the Enterprise Estonia that helps Estonian companies sharpen their innovation capabilities and strengthen their international positioning.
The fourth cohort of the programme included ten companies from across Estonia’s economy, from media group Postimees to telecoms provider Telia Eesti. Tallinna Sadam came out on top, and its winning project points toward something more commercially ambitious than an internal efficiency drive: a potential new business line built on exporting the port’s hard-won digital expertise.
Rene Pärt, board member and business development director at Tallinna Sadam, said the programme’s structured approach was its main practical value. “The programme’s greatest value was the systematic approach and the frameworks that supported our work over eight months – both on our own organisation and on specific development projects.”
Innovation, Pärt emphasised, is not a new concept at Tallinna Sadam. The company has operated under a vision of becoming the most forward-looking port on the Baltic Sea for around a decade, and that thinking shows up in concrete deployments: automated mooring systems have replaced traditional rope-based berthing at the Old City Harbour, and a traffic management solution enables contactless passenger flow from ticket purchase to boarding.
A new way of port business
The prize-winning work, however, centred on something outward-facing. During the programme, Tallinna Sadam conducted validation interviews with more than 20 ports worldwide and found consistent demand for exactly the kind of digital knowledge the company has accumulated – but also a recurring obstacle. “The pressure to digitalise and improve efficiency is strong, but often the first investment seems too large and too risky, and people end up talking a different language to technology firms,” Pärt said.
Tallinna Sadam’s proposition, as it has now defined it, is to act as a peer guide rather than a vendor: helping other ports map out a digitalisation roadmap step by step, and identifying which first investment will deliver enough return to justify the next. “We can be a methodical, step-by-step partner in creating a digitalisation roadmap and deciding which first investment brings the kind of benefit that allows for the next one,” Pärt said.
The company already operates with sufficient remote management capability to run critical operations across its port sites from different locations – a resilience that was stress-tested, Pärt noted, during the Covid pandemic. It now sees the strongest international interest coming from markets where cargo and passenger volumes are in significant flux and where governments are actively directing ports to find efficiency gains – but where the knowledge and experience to do so is lacking.
Ursel Velve, chair of EIS and head of the programme jury, said Tallinna Sadam stood out for the combination of its team’s commitment and its ambition. “Their innovation strategy includes the ambition to offer digitalisation and automation services outside Estonia as an infrastructure company, which supports the export of Estonian services,” she said.
“The strongest results emerge when a company’s ambition, team commitment and a systematically managed innovation process all come together,” added Lo Rihvk, board member at programme implementer BDA Consulting.
Pärt is keeping the success metric simple. “In business, revenue is the primary measure of performance. We hope that in a couple of years the company will be able to take satisfaction not just in the efficiency gains from developing its own processes, but also in having helped other organisations take their next step.”
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