Facilitating start-ups located in the port-city interface is one of the current policy strategies of municipalities in many port-cities worldwide to encourage innovations in constantly evolving port areas. This could help the re-development of vacant ex-port land, while also offering new economic orientations for the city and the port. The aim of the paper is therefore to explore what conditions are needed to facilitate and encourage start-ups in innovation ecosystems in the port-city interface. The analysis is based on two in-depth case studies of the port-cities of Montreal (Canada) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands). The results indicate that government initiatives to actively facilitate start-ups in formerly industrialized port areas are quite successful. However, the functional linkages between start-ups and port activities remains rather limited, if not entirely absent, and the impact on the functioning of the innovation ecosystem at large is not substantial. Other factors such as capital, collaboration and proximity are valued more than the physical location of the start-up. In this, other actors in the ecosystem besides the municipality and the port authority also play a key role. Furthermore, start-ups often feel limited in their innovative capacity because of stringent regulations and institutional rigidness. Governments and port authorities could facilitate in this respect by working more demand-driven in terms of unburdening and creating more institutional support, instead of imposing top-down rules and regulations to try to govern the ecosystem, which in itself can be considered a contradiction in terms.@en

The main research problem has been analyzing and comparing the efficiencies of road and rail freight transport networks in different geographical contexts and derive policy suggestions from the results based on a dataset that spans multiple continents, covers multiple countries and covers a longer time period. For Europe, the benchmarking results for rail indicate that the efficiency of rail freight companies must be encouraged, however, the efficiency of the rail freight system should be treated on a single European level. In the SFA road model for the whole period (2000−2012), it shows that many countries are already quite efficient which suggest that policy should aim for keeping the efficiency high. In addition, a relatively lower population density leads to relatively more infrastructure needs and less efficiency which might lead certain countries to accept a lower efficiency. In Europe, rail efficiency shows that liberalization of rail freight transport does not have much impact in the sense that marked improvements in efficiency for individual countries can be observed. In the end, freight transport efficiencies in different geographical contexts have been analyzed and improvements in governance decisions have been suggested.@en

Much of the success of containerisation is due to time economies, particularly the reduction in the duration of port calls. Although vessels now spend a small amount of time in port compared with the time at sea, it is still a cost factor. The focus of this study is the amount of time container vessels spend in port. The average vessel turnaround times (ATTs) involving 70 ports of call involved in four major trade routes are examined. The principal research questions addressed are: how do ATTs vary among ports and how is this time metric related to port performance? ATTs are compared with traffic volumes measures of port efficiency. The results are weak and lead to a hypothesis that ATTs are differentiated regionally and functionally, rather than globally. Evidence is presented for this hypothesis. Several theoretical issues are considered arising from the results and questions for further research are presented.@en