Atlantic Regional Initiative: Innovation Clusters Roadmap, Version 2.1

Space Agencies such as the European Space Agency feature a long-term perspective that could help address global grand challenges and achieve sustainable development. However, this perspective is under-utilised, and does not quite synergise with the fast-paced short-term demands of the commercial maritime innovation sectors. The challenge for the space sector in both governance and space agency competencies, is how to best support and enhance knowledge transfer, innovation, and commercial opportunities in fast-paced, and rapidly expanding arenas.

The Atlantic is one such rapidly changing arena. Blue Economies along both Eastern and Western seaboards feature a long and rich history of maritime tradition and innovation, and rapidly expanding and diversifying commercial sectors. However, a path for ESA to support this region with Space-enabled technologies/data is unclear, which hinders their ability to quickly respond to the needs of the maritime sector, and support the nurturing of Blue Growth. Technological Innovation Clusters are vehicles to rapidly identify and address potential bottlenecks in the innovation ecosystem, and realise EO-maritime solutions. They can form a bridge, which links long-term vision and strategy, with short-term commerce and opportunity. The ESA-funded Blue Economy: Innovation Clusters, Atlantic Natural Resources Management and Maritime Spatial Planning project built on its suite of three demonstration activities, to chart a way forward for knowledge transfer from EO into sustainable Blue Economies across the Atlantic. The demonstrations are examples of the far greater potential that EO-based services provide. With this in mind, the consortium worked with a wide range of governance, private industry, education, and Atlantic observation stakeholders to develop the suite of recommendations presented here to the ESA. These would enable the ESA to strategically target future animation efforts, marrying short term opportunities with long-term vision.

Structured discussions and stakeholder data analysis have identified exciting innovation avenues, cutting-edge knowledge transfer opportunities, and a series of restraints on innovation and commercial development, which targeted investment, and coordination with Innovation Clusters could overcome. This roadmap presents the culmination of the first iteration of this research, providing unrefined guidance and recommendations to ESA on how it can strategically harness the potential of Innovation Clusters to maximise EO-derived data opportunities and uptake by the Atlantic maritime sector.

While unrefined, the roadmap does provide an overview of Blue Economies, Innovation Clusters and the Earth Observation opportunity. It presents a brief outline of the approach used in the Blue Economy project with regard to the Innovation Clusters road-mapping, and aspects which could be integrated as good practice in other initiatives going forward. It then explores the range of recommendations concerning Innovation Clusters, produced by the stakeholder engagement and quality control analyses, presenting them under four themes. In addition, the road-mapping process has provided insights into three deep-dive thematics, which are also provided.

In many cases, the recommendations contained in the deep-dive thematics align with, synergise with, or complement those in the core Innovation Clusters roadmap.
Recommendations are presented to the ESA in the form of Action Areas. Detailed information on how ESA could implement these higher-level action Areas are also contained in this document as the pool of baseline recommendations. These are presented along with the context information which is essential to truly understand them.