Deliverables

STAKEHOLDERS MAP

Blue Economy is not by itself an industrial sector. This made the identification and categorization of stakeholders in the proposed database a major challenge. Acknowledging the lessons learned from the compilation and analysis of FANBEST Blue Economy Stakeholder Directory we are able to define a set of conclusions and recommendations on the BE stakeholder landscape of the Atlantic Area.

  • Sectorial support: 72% of stakeholders providing financial support independently from the Blue Economy sector, in particular, public institutions (EU and national), research institutions, higher education/academia.
  • Sectoral representativeness: among the Blue Economy sectors identified within this research, seabed mining is substantially underrepresented in the analysis.
  • Support Blue Economy through Multi-Use: It was noticed that the only financial instrument within the analysis that actively supports a soft Multi-Use deployment on local scale is the CLLD with pescatourism (small scale fishery or aquaculture and coastal tourism) activities, enhancement of the natural/cultural heritage with sustainable seafood harvesting or production.
  • Territorial specificity of financial support: should be better designed towards the dependency of the beneficiaries acting in sub- areas and the dependency to specific biotic and abiotic marine resources. This may lead also to geographically and sectorial specializations that can provide new opportunities to showcase products, services and qualifications with a high value in the Atlantic Territory and beyond.
  • Align Blue Economy support to the Atlantic Strategy: the Atlantic suffers from the absence of Blue Economy support mechanisms that could operate in similar mechanisms as established in other European sea basins, such as the BlueMed-Initiative or the Facility for Blue Growth in the Black Sea.
  • Methodologies for addressing Blue Economy support on sea basin level: The developed Blue Economy stakeholder mapping methodology provides a scalable and flexible approach in the analysis of Blue Economy landscape in the Atlantic Region.

R&D IN THE BLUE ECONOMY COMPANIES

 

The present report is developed as the final deliverable for Activity 4.2. of the FANBEST Project (Funding Atlantic Network for Blue Economy Technology Transfer; www.fanbest.eu). This action is part of the W.P.4, related to the identification of the financial needs to propel Blue Economy innovation in the Atlantic Regions, being 4.2. the Analysis of the potential of Atlantic R&D+i for blue growth.

 

This document is based on a sample of 610 companies creating a panel data to perform a descriptive analysis in terms of patenting activity on Blue Economy companies and financial evolution of Blue Economy firms. Results show that the Blue Economy in the Atlantic Area has had an important capacity to innovate in the last two decades, where bigger companies were the ones capturing to a greater extent its potential benefits, and strong differences exist between regions in terms of company characteristics and innovative capacity.

 

PORTFOLIO OF FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS

 

This document, as deliverable of FAN-BEST project’s action 5.4, consists of developing a portfolio of agents and financing instruments which are being offered to SMEs within the Blue Economy sector. It includes the main entities, tools and financing options, both public and private currently available for the Blue Economy as well as the main financing gaps identified in the sector.

 

This task contributes to achieve the objective of action 5.4: design a set of new financial instruments to be offered by the Project and to be implemented by selecting and coaching innovative projects of entrepreneurs and star-ups in Blue Economy. This set will include a combination of instruments and programmes, which will be selected to finance the innovative projects of start-ups or for scaling up of existing SME in the targeted sectors covering the Atlantic Area as part of the Project’s coach service (WP6).

 

The data collection to design this portfolio was based on diverse bibliography. One of the sources has been the Stakeholder Map carried out as Action 4.1 of FAN-BEST Project.1

 

In addition, an exhaustive structured web research (websites and national and EU project databases) has been carried out to identify financing agents instruments connected with the Blue Economy.

 

So, specifically, the aim of this document was to identify financial instruments which can finance R&D projects in B.E offered by diverse stakeholders across 3 different geographic scales: EU, national and regional level.

 

ANALYSIS OF PRIVATE CAPITAL FUNDS FOR THE BLUE ECONOMY

 

The present report builds upon the results achieved in WP4 of the FAN-BEST project with a stronger focus on equity funds for the blue economy. Exploiting the stakeholders map developed in activity 4.2 (Depellegrin D, 2022), the analysis consists of extracting the key characteristics of a representative set of private equity funds with proven track-record in the Blue Economy (seed, series A, crowdfunding, etc…). For each category of fund, the objective is to determine the typical procedure and documents for an entrepreneur to prepare. In turn, common characteristics as well as special features are described.