Europe's maritime industry appears to be an economic micro cosmos. 120 shipyards and 9000 suppliers are co-operating to produce ships worth 10 Billion Euro a year. Enhancing the competitiveness of this community of enterprises can provide for a more sustainable economy by enabling them towards better interoperability in design and production and all along the supply chain, creating an advantage that other maritime communities will be hard pressed to duplicate. Analysis of marine enterprise interaction and, in particular, marine supply chains in Europe has shown a high potential for improvements in respect to management strategies and information technologies. This can be triggered by increased awareness and improved know-how transfer mechanisms.

The first WONDERMAR project made successful progress towards these goals. Its successor, WONDERMAR II (IST-2001-33017 'Wide Open Network for Development and Research in Maritime Industries'), strives to improve on those results, providing a platform for both exchange of views and experience in the latest technological developments among the big players as well as presenting it to the SMEs in five different European regions. This will foster the existing R&D results in general and will also help in the transition of research results into products, respectively putting results into operation. Europe's Maritime Industry will thus be enabled to be more competitive with other regions.