Utilizing Breakthrough Innovations: The Need for Information Sharing as a New Key Performance Indicator for Container Port Operations

As a response to higher customer demand and increased competition, innovations in port operations is of concern for port customers and port operators. The growth in world trade is doubling every 5–7 years with a corresponding increase in cargo container movements, most of which are handled by seaports. Moving more traffic through the limited area of a seaport can only be achieved by an increase in port performance. Shipowners, terminal operators and forwarding agents each have optimized their performance guided by values collected on key performance indicators. The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the understanding of the use of key performance indicators as a mean to drive port innovations. We argue that the use of standard key performance indicators leaves ports in the region of incremental innovations with a diminishing rate of return of investments, missing out on the potential efficiency growth by breakthrough innovations. Our results from a case study at Oslo port shows that operations suffer from a lack of information sharing resulting in an unused potential, not captured by the current performance indicators. We propose a new Information Sharing Indicator to motivate and guide ports in adopting breakthrough innovations for information sharing.