Prioritizing decarbonization and digitalization bets across aviation, marine, and rail transport sectors

Starting point

The client had built a strong franchise in road transport, particularly around electric vehicles and charging. Coverage in aviation, marine, and rail, however, was limited and fragmented. Leadership could see rising pressure on these sectors to decarbonize and digitize, driven by agreements such as the Paris Accord and schemes such as CORSIA and IMO regulations.

What they lacked was a clear answer to three questions. First, which decarbonization pathways in aviation, marine, and rail were realistically credible on a 10- to 15-year horizon. Second, how digital technologies such as predictive maintenance, digital twins, and fleet optimization would reshape value in each sector. Third, where the real market and client opportunity lay for a research and intelligence business.

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Approach

The provider engaged a small group of four strategists, including Bhuvan Maingi, who later founded Strathen Group, to design and run a focused market research project. The mandate was to build a cross-sector evidence base, construct simple but robust scorecards, and deliver a prioritized roadmap for where to expand first and how to plug new themes into existing teams, products, and sales motions.

The work began with scoping and framework design. Aviation, marine, and rail sectors were each broken down into core use cases, emissions baselines, and major technology families. For each sector, the team defined two core lenses: a decarbonization pathway lens that would assess technical credibility and policy support, and a digital disruption lens that would assess how data, software, and automation could shift value and open new insight needs for clients.

With this structure in place, the team ran about ten expert interviews with stakeholders across the value chain, including equipment manufacturers, operators, regulators, and policy bodies. These conversations were supplemented with internal data from the client’s terminal and existing sector coverage, as well as public policy and technology roadmaps. This helped anchor the work in real investment timelines, regulatory constraints, and operational realities rather than marketing claims.

Next, the findings were translated into scorecards. For each sector, a pathway credibility scorecard assessed the technical readiness and scaling potential of key decarbonization options such as sustainable aviation fuels, short-haul electrification, biofuel blending in shipping, and hydrogen or solar in rail. A digital disruption scorecard assessed the maturity and impact of predictive maintenance, digital twins, fleet management platforms, and autonomy. These were combined into a market attractiveness view that brought together disruption potential, policy pressure, and addressable revenue pools for a research and intelligence provider.

Finally, the team mapped execution moves. They worked with divisional leadership to link priority themes into existing structures. Aviation was broken into pieces that could slot into oil demand, electrified transport, policy, and digital industries teams. Marine opportunities were mapped to policy and digital fleet management lenses, with a clear dependency on quantifying value in secondary markets. Rail was scoped as selective coverage, with emphasis on electrification, digital operations in China, and solar and emerging technologies in India.

Instead of chasing every headline about green aviation and shipping, leadership received a disciplined, scorecard-based view of where decarbonization and digital disruption were most credible and commercially relevant.

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Outcome

The project gave the client a clear, defensible answer to where it should expand beyond road transport and in what sequence. Aviation emerged as the first priority. Short-haul electrification looked credible on a late 2020s to early 2030s horizon, sustainable aviation fuels had growing policy and airline support, and predictive maintenance and digital twins were already changing how airlines and manufacturers operated. The team translated these into specific coverage modules and handoffs for existing internal teams.

Marine was positioned as the next opportunity, with regulatory pressure from international bodies and credible near-term levers such as biofuel blending and batteries on shorter routes. Digital fleet management was identified as a key entry point, with a recommendation to move once further value quantification and customer testing had been completed. Rail was framed as a selective coverage area, focused on markets where electrification, autonomy, and solar integration were at scale or moving quickly.

Internally, the work did more than rank sectors. It provided a client-ready narrative and a set of simple artifacts, including scorecards, target lists, and execution moves, that product and sales teams could use immediately. Divisional leadership could see which customer sets to target, where to cross-sell new themes into existing subscribers, and how to sequence hiring and resourcing over the next planning cycles.

The decarbonization and digitalization roadmap became a reference point for future planning in the transport division, helping the provider invest ahead of client demand in the right sectors while avoiding spread across areas where technology or policy signals were still too weak.

For research and intelligence leaders, the shift was treating new themes as businesses with roadmaps, not just as one-off report topics.

This project continues to influence how Strathen Group evaluates new growth themes, using scorecards, market sizing, and execution moves to treat emerging topics like decarbonization and digitalization as full businesses with roadmaps, not one-off reports.