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Seaports have gained importance in recent years, but they have also featured fundamental changes. For example, societal and environmental pressures have increased. As a consequence of these pressures, corporate social responsibility has gradually been introduced also in the ports sector. One of the impacts is at the level and type of innovation. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the way that corporate social responsibility emerges among company goals in seaports and the extent to which innovation initiatives respond to the goals raised.

To reach its objective, the paper applies a two-step approach. Starting from scientific literature, it drafts an initial set of port-related company goals. This list is validated through a Delphi approach. In a second step, the paper applies a scoring of how port innovation initiatives respond to the raised goals. Furthermore, it determines the degree of homogeneity of both the objective scoring and the innovation scoring, and those two are then compared.

The paper derives how relevant a specific innovation action is to a specific company goal, and to which extent it actually contributes to achieving the goal. The most relevant objectives turn out to be turnover and CO₂ emissions. It furthermore seems that the social objectives are best achieved. Best achievable seem the “dangerous goods” and “training”.

The results give insight into which socially important objectives need public support, and which initiatives are to be stimulated.

The results allow making an initial typology of actions and conditions that contribute to innovation “success”.

The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology of comparing concession projects developed in different transport sub-sectors. The methodology is tested in the comparison of three different cases, each of which represent a particular mode of transport: a road development project, a city tramway project and a port lock construction initiative.

A fuzzy logic approach methodology is applied in carrying out the comparison between cases. Granulation is achieved by employing a Contextual (Ws) Risk Analysis Framework, as risks constitute the basis to public private partnership (PPP) structure. Linguistic variables are then used to describe the comparative findings.

The methodology presented allows for the comparison of three cases from different transport sub-sectors. Identification of similarities provides the potential to transfer experience from one sector to the other. With respect to the three cases studied, it was identified that traffic risk seems to be passed on to the private operators in relation to the level of exclusivity. Finally, PPP projects initiated by central government (as opposed to those initiated by local governments) seem to be more finance-driven than service-driven.

As the number of cases to be compared increases, quantitative comparative analysis fuzzy set values can be included in order to carry out a full analysis. The present approach should be considered introductory, as fuzzy sets are not generated due to the limited number of surveys (cases) compared (hence the term “pre-fuzzy”).

The methodology presented and the cases tested indicate the possibility for knowledge/experience transfer and the transferability of best practices.

Cross-sub-sectoral comparisons for transport PPP projects have not been identified in literature.