The future of Naval shipbuilding in Europe. Will Joint Product Development solve the problems?

The European naval shipbuilding industry differs a lot from the civil shipbuilding industry according to market structure, efficiency and competition. The market consists of so-called ‘national champions’ whose production is for the greater part based on demand from the national navy. This research is carried out to investigate whether joint product development is a good solution for the industry to overcome the problems and move towards a more efficient and competitive market. The literature about joint product development indicates that acquiring new skills and manage competition are main drivers for JPD, while unintended knowledge sharing is the biggest threat. The key success factors, also important for the naval shipbuilding industry, are the choice of adequate partner and building a good and trustful relationship with them. This is confirmed by the aerospace cases, while in both the EADS and JSF-case the choice of partner has been indicated as success factor. In the cases is also shown that establishing a good relationship between partners is valuable, as well as involvement from the government, both European and national. Implementing joint product development in the industry is a hard task, while there are considerable differences between the companies. All stakeholders foresee a major task here for the governments and the European Union, by creating a (legal) framework in which companies are stimulated to cooperate and by initiating more transnational shipbuilding programmes. In this way, the industry can move to consolidation, become more competitive and more efficient after all.