The offshore wind industry has graduated its first MBA

Shravan Kumars mor Jayasree fløj ind fra Hyderabad, Indien, for at fejre med, da den herboende inder tidligere i år dimitterede fra OWEMBA som offshore vindindustriens første MBA. Med til fejring var også hustruen Vanitha og børnene Aadhya og Sri Vansh Flemming Østergaard, udviklingschef på EASV.

Shravan Kumar's mother Jayasree flew in from Hyderabad to celebrate when he graduated from OWEMBA as the offshore wind industry's first MBA. Also present were wife Vanitha and children Aasdya and Sri Vansh and Flemming Østergaard, EASV.

In 2019, 13 leading energy companies and two business academies joined forces to tailor an MBA program for the offshore wind industry.

OWEMBA; The Offshore Wind Energy MBA was designed with the ambition to raise the level of knowledge and competence for both companies and employees. More than 70 wind industry professionals registered for the first module.

Nine courses, a main thesis and 60 ECTS points later, senior manager Shravan Kumar, business development at Stiesdal Hydrogen, can, as the first, call himself a master in offshore wind as an OWEMBA graduate. He praises OWMBA for a 'very instructive course':

"We have worked with relevant cases and were able to consult with specialists who can only be accessed in the industry. There is so much knowledge about wind concentrated in this part of Denmark. I have gained an excellent network of peers and leaders across the entire value chain with whom I can spar,” says Shravan Kumar.

Important industry support

A further handful of students will graduate during the autumn. Currently, 20-25 students are working on the nine modules at Hochschule Bremerhaven and Erhvervsakademi Sydvest (EASV), which set the framework for the MBA courses.

"The training has proven its relevance," says Flemming Østergaard, head of development at EASV:

"The industry supports the Offshore Wind Energy MBA as an investment in the company and the employees and spend energy formulating the tasks and making themselves available for sparring," he says.

According to Flemming Østergaard, the support contributes to the fact that the OWEMBA program is evaluated very highly by the participants.

"Offshore wind has a very wide range, which must be embraced in the tasks - and at the same time we must ensure that the education works like a 'classic' MBA. The evaluations and the support show that OWEMBA has passed," he says.

FACTS:

OWEMBA was initially supported with pool funds from the ERASMUS program, which aims to promote cooperation between higher education institutions in EU member states.

The MBA's 60 ECTS points are made up of 9 modules of 5 ECTS points and a main assignment of 15 ECTS.

"There are very few examples of a niche developing into a global industry as quickly as is the case with offshore wind. The technical development alone has been colossal. The MBA has given me new insight into finance and business development, which I have greatly benefited from and which has already shaped my career development.”

Shravan Kumar, first graduate of OWEMBA; the wind industry's own MBA program.

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If you want to make real progress in the green transition, focusing solely on technology is not enough.

That’s one of the key takeaways from DecomBlades – a project that has just been named Innovation Project of the Year for its groundbreaking work on recycling glass fibre from decommissioned wind turbine blades.

DecomBlades has tackled one of the wind industry's biggest headaches: how to recycle glass fibre in a way that creates real value and maintains material quality. And they’ve done it – not just as a lab experiment, but at scale. Recycled glass fibre is already being used in the production of new blades.

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The project brought together some of the most experienced and forward-looking players in the wind sector and was supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark.

Project partners in DecomBlades are Ørsted, LM Wind Power, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, FLSmidth, MAKEEN Energy A/S, HJHansen Recycling Group, University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

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