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Mostly small firms or smaller parts of larger firms that invest in offshore wind or solar PV.
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Diversity amongst firms may influence industries’ ability to ‘act together’.
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Demanding to demonstrate products and services – especially without a home market.
While we have identified a significant number of Norwegian firms we see that many of the firms
dedicate very limited resources to OWP and PV. That is, even though many of the respondents
represent medium or large firms, the percentage of turnover that comes from OWP or PV remains
negligible. This is particularly true for offshore wind. This raises the question of to what extent these
firms are capable of tapping into the growing international markets for products or services that are
only at the fringe of the core activities of the firm.
We see a related challenge in that we observe that the activities of OWP and PV firms are distributed
across long and complex supply chains and that there is a large diversity in the products and services
that firms offer. Moreover, these firms vary considerably in size and geographic location. The firms
also vary substantially in their commitment to OWP and PV as compared to their core activities. While
variety can be positive it also raises the question of whether actors in the industry are sufficiently
organised in order to effectively promote and communicate their interests.
Further, we want to underline some general barriers to internationalisation identified in the survey
data. The surveyed firms are mostly oriented towards international markets (except most of the PV
system suppliers). Whereas the PV firms have customers spread across the globe, the OWP firms are
highly concentrating their attention on the markets in the North Sea area. International collaboration
is considered important, and in general firms seem to collaborate quite extensively with international
partners. However, we note that there are also a significant number of firms with no international
collaboration on OWP or PV, which points to some potential difficulties for some firms in gaining access
to international partners. This is further underlined by the observation that in both industries barriers
related to market access are considered as the most challenging.
The majority of the surveyed firms provide services. We find this interesting for two reasons. First, this
underlines the fact that the OWP and PV industries comprise of much more than the components we
see in a fully commissioned offshore wind or solar energy park. Second, services firms have often been
regarded as less innovative than manufacturing firms. However, these firms provide services that
involve a high degree of innovation and complex technology. Nevertheless, these firms may engage in
different innovation activities that depend on different policy instruments than typical manufacturing
firms. We think this is important to keep in mind as OWP and PV services can represent a significant