The “greening” of shipping remains a challenge despite the development of technologies aiming at decarbonisation and reduction of air-pollutant emissions. Considering a wide variety of ship types and applications, the choice of the most adequate greening solution for a ship of certain size, type, and operational profile is not straightforward. SYNERGETICS is a Horizon Europe Innovation Action which aims at supporting the greening of inland and coastal shipping by addressing the potentials of retrofit technologies. This paper presents first findings of SYNERGETICS which aim at establishing the synergies between the knowledge available from previous and ongoing research (“Exploration”) and the experiences gained from past and ongoing pilot projects (“Synchronization”). A comprehensive database of pilot projects containing 115 inland vessels and 50 coastal ships was created and analysed to establish and explain the trends in greening of inland and coastal shipping. It was found that most of the pilots in inland navigation are conducted on vessels with relatively low power demands and/or with low variations of operational profiles, while coastal shipping features a relatively low number of pilots. This increases the certainty for shipowners but limits the possibilities for scaling up the greening of shipping.