Jan G. Skjoldhammer
Founder, CEO and Inventor
Former SAS airline captain. Sweden’s Mission Innovation Champion (2020) and Innovator of the Year. A lifetime of hands-on invention, from ski technology to transit brake-recovery systems.
Company
A small team of impact-driven experts
Ten people carry NoviOcean day to day. Board members, strategic advisers and specialist contributors are listed separately, so it is always clear who does what.
NoviOcean hardware under offshore testing in Sweden — the work the core team stays close to.
How the team is built
A focused core team, with genuine wider capability around it.
NoviOcean runs with a small core team covering engineering, policy, finance, business development and hands-on mechanics. Keeping it small is deliberate: decisions stay close to the hardware, and the company does not carry capability it needs only occasionally.
The wider capability is real, but it is not the same thing. Board members, strategic advisers and specialist contributors work with NoviOcean on defined parts of the programme, and specialist manufacturers and shipyards build what they build best. Those groups are listed separately below rather than merged into one wall of faces — nobody appears on this page to make the company look larger.
The team
Three groups, clearly separated.
Engineering, policy, finance and hands-on mechanics. The people listed below are the core team; board members, strategic advisers and specialist contributors are shown separately so it is clear who does what.
Core team
Cornelia Röper
Chief Operations Officer
MSc in environment, politics and development. Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe and a Gates Foundation SDG Goalkeeper. Founder and network builder; former strategic lead at Germany’s largest climate accelerator.
Stefan Björklund
Chief Technology Officer
Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, 33 years teaching and researching at KTH Stockholm. Researcher and supervisor on wave and tidal energy projects since 2012.
John Sugrue
Chief Industrial Officer
BSc in materials and production. Engineering manager in heavy automotive tooling and electronics manufacture, with director-level experience in large-scale telecom operations. Technology-transfer projects in the US, Canada, Iraq and the UK.
Divya Bharathi Manem
Technical & Business Manager
B.Tech in electrical and electronics engineering, M.Sc. in environmental science. Research engineer and IT specialist connecting environmental evidence to clean-energy decisions.
Variya Kietprungvej
Business Development Director
International MBA and BSc in electrical engineering. Business development across wave, offshore wind and solar, with engineering consulting experience in oil and gas.
Jonathan Thomas Lyons
Grants, Policy & Partnerships Manager
MPA in European studies in climate and energy. Energy policy, regulatory frameworks and project development for the energy transition.
Fika Triandini
Investment and Finance Manager
MS in environmental and resource economics. Sustainable-finance specialist in blended finance and de-risking private capital; former adviser on national green-bond frameworks.
Erik Wedlund
Chief Mechanic
Technician from the construction industry. Long expertise developing high-performing engines and metal constructions.
Mamoune Brahim
Web and Multimedia Designer
Web developer and designer, and audiovisual creator. Builds and maintains the NoviOcean website and its visual material.
Board and strategic advisers
NoviOcean’s board and its strategic advisers work with the company on governance, industrialisation and commercial strategy.
Mats Andersson
Board Director
MSc. Former chief executive of three listed companies.
Ziad Jeha
Honorary Board Member
BSc in geology. Former senior executive in global energy-services operations.
Daniel Hagström
Strategic Adviser
Entrepreneur and investor; founder and former chief executive of an industrial venture.
Specialist contributors
Specialists contribute to defined parts of the programme — offshore hydrodynamics, vertical-axis wind, industrial design, contracts and communications — rather than to the company as a whole.
Sricharan Vaddiraju
Hydrodynamic specialist
PhD in ocean engineering. Offshore hydrodynamics, mooring and marine structures.
Steven Piece
Vertical-axis wind specialist
Advises industry on wind, solar, wave and other clean-energy solutions.
Mikael Lindberg
Aesthetics and design adviser
Industrial designer with an automotive background.
Tomas Carlmark
Lawyer, contracts
Master of Laws.
Anna Fägersten
PR and Communications
Business degree in marketing and sales.
How we work
A small core team, with specialists around it.
NoviOcean is a systems integrator. Rather than building every discipline in-house, the company brings in the organisations that already do a given job at industrial quality, and concentrates its own engineering on the wave system and on making the whole platform work offshore.
The core
Kept deliberately small
Ten people cover engineering, operations, industrialisation, policy, finance, business development and hands-on mechanics. Advisers and specialists are engaged where their expertise applies, for as long as it applies.
Specialist technologies
Wind Harvest and Midsummer
The wind and solar hardware comes from specialists whose technology is already established. NoviOcean integrates these technologies; it does not reinvent them.
Construction
Built by shipyards
The floating structure uses conventional welded-steel shipyard engineering and established marine construction methods, built with yard partners rather than in an in-house facility.
The wave system is NoviOcean’s own, presently TRL 6 and progressing toward TRL 7. management estimate
The same principle applies to people: expertise is brought in where it applies, and named publicly only once the role is current and confirmed. Each partner technology is described in full on the Partners page → and what still has to be engineered and validated is set out on the Technology page →
Talk to the people building it.
Project and customer discussions, investor conversations and strategic partnerships all reach the same small team — the fastest route is a short introductory meeting.