In practice, the project developed a transnational mentoring programme to help start-ups, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), municipalities and students with a good business idea to bring it to life. “We matched them with technical, business, legal or marketing experts from the Baltic Sea region so that they could find partners, gain knowledge, progress and finally bring their product to the market.”

With their service, the project partners piloted 26 successful cases in Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands and Poland. An example is Furcella, an Estonian start-up producing a day and night cream with the use of red microalgae antioxidants and oils. A German mentor helped them to find raw materials suppliers in Germany which were needed to develop the cosmetic.

With the extension stage project ALLIANCE+, the project partners complemented the mentoring programme with a complete business plan, ensuring a continuation of their work with mentors and investors as a permanent service part of the SUBMARINER Network (the lead project partner) and managing to support 12 additional cases.

Making a step towards environmentally friendly mussel cultivation in the Baltic Sea

“One goal was to get finally away from the research stage of already ongoing pilots to transform them into fully operating farms,” clarified Angela Schultz-Zehden, managing director of the SUBMARINER Network, the lead partner of Baltic Blue Growth. “Secondly, we wanted to exert political pressure to get mussels accepted as a sea-based measure to counteract the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea as well as a local sustainable marine resource that can be used in future feed products.”

The project partners worked with five pilot mussel farms in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Latvia and Estonia. Thanks to the use of innovative technologies and farming techniques, different materials, set-ups and locations, it was possible to establish good practices for a mussel cultivation that is adapted to the features of the Baltic Sea. Additionally, the partners collected data from all the different pilot farms to show the overall positive environmental impacts of mussel farming, including its effects upon better water quality, an increased biodiversity and the lack of oxygen depletion. 

“The most important thing now is that we get regions interested to really assist in building up these mussel cultivations and give support to whoever is operating the mussels farm for the service they deliver to society.” In fact, as explained in this Policy Paper of  SUBMARINER Network Mussels Working Group, mussel farming is not only an effective nutrient mitigation and/or compensation measure but it’s also cost-effective.

Advancing an efficient use of renewable aquatic resources

The platform promotes the achievements of more than 60 blue bioeconomy projects in the Baltic Sea region (among which ALLIANCE and Baltic Blue Growth) from Interreg, BONUS, the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund and Horizon2020. In practice, the Blue Platform serves as an information point on blue bioeconomy knowledge and products (e.g. reports, analyses, developed tools) as well as a database of the main actors involved for all those seeking cooperation and support in the sector. 

“The network behind the platform is very important as we saw that start-ups and entrepreneurs are very eager to look for suitable collaborators. For example, they want to find biomass providers, technology or piloting facilities, to perform studies and to receive help with business development or legal issues.”

Finally, project partners have also shaped a Blue Platform Roadmap 2021-2027, which  defines the next key steps to further advance the blue bioeconomy in the region and identifies the most promising and relevant topics (e.g. aquaculture, mussel and algae farming or marine biotechnology) covered by the projects.

Developing coherent maritime spatial plans across the entire region

“We had in mind a two ways approach when creating the project platform,” said Elina Veidemane, Deputy Head of the Vision and Strategies Around the Baltic Sea (VASAB) Secretariat, the lead partner of the project platform Capacity4MSP. “One step was gathering and amplifying the knowledge and the inputs from the different projects related to maritime spatial planning. Another step was intensifying the dialogue on the matter, in order to share the gained knowledge among the stakeholders involved in maritime activities.” 

Capacity4MSP synthesises a great variety of data from 23 MSP-related projects in the region funded by Interreg, Horizon 2020, BONUS and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund. “It allowed us to collect a great number of different ideas, identifying the existing gaps,” added Inga Jēkabsone, project manager of the lead partner team of Capacity4MSP. “Until now, 21 topics were covered, as maritime spatial planning is a very horizontal field and there are so many sub-topics connected to it, e.g. fishery, shipping, maritime safety, coastal tourism, acquaculture, etc.”

Thanks to the Capacity4MSP, spatial planners around the Baltic Sea received access to knowledge and best practices on maritime spatial planning and a cooperation platform to further exchange on and develop national plans. 

Looking into new innovative perspectives and due to the great variety of topics covered by the platform, the project partners will intensify the dialogue with the energy, the cultural and other interrelated sectors exploring what are their reciprocate needs and how to be better aligned in the future to strenghten maritime spatial planning in the region.