EATIP Annual General Meeting 2025
The EATIP Annual General Meeting was held this year on the 17th & 18th of June 2025 in beautiful Norway House, in Brussels.
Smart Circular Aquaculture Partnership Launched!
On behalf of EATiP, our Mirror Platforms and the Hauts de France region, EATiP and Pole Aquimer have attended the launch of the Thematic Smart Specialisation Platform (TSSP) for Smart Circular Aquaculture at the S3 Forum in Barcelona.
Aquaculture has been identified as one of the highlighted areas in the S3 Thematic Platform on Sustainable Blue Economy. The partnership has particular ambitions to contribute to the blue economy targets related to:
- Energy transition in the aquaculture sector: introduction of renewable energy sources, more efficient use of energy, less energy-demanding feed resources
- More efficient use of water & space: RAS technologies, aquaponics, site optimisation with respect to ecosystem hydrodynamics and biogeochemistry and to other uses of the marine space, monitoring and management tools for precision farming
- Fighting scarcity of feed ingredients: resource-efficient novel feeds e.g. SCP, algae, insects, marine invertebrates
- Better use of side streams, promoting circular production systems: recovering and utilising by-products from processing plants: fish, shellfish; from RAS/closed systems: sludge, effluents; exploring business model for IMTA and aquaponics
- More targeted and skilled human capacity: training of existing staff and educating new candidates to enable the needed transitions in aquaculture
Further details on the platform are available here.
The EATiP General Secretary introduces the founding EATiP Mirror Platforms and Lead Region
Founding EATiP Mirror Platforms within the Partnership include: Pole Aquimer, Cluster Acuiplus, NCE Aquatech, NCE Aquaculture, AquaCultuur Vlaanderen and with the lead Region of Hauts de France.
This platform is part of the Smart Specialisation Strategy Community of Practice (S3 CoP) concept. This is itself part of the Communities and Networks policy of European Regional Cohesion Policy.
Two years ago DG MARE, in conjunction with DG REGIO, founded a new pillar of the Smart Specialisation strategy: Blue Economy. There are five areas of interest – Renewable Energy, Tourism, Blue Bio Technology, Fisheries and Aquaculture.
EATiP are very keen to hear from aquaculture stakeholders who think that there is interest from within their own region to join the TSSP, or who are aware of regional / national clusters that might like to join the EATiP Mirror Platform network.
- If you are aware of other European regions that have aquaculture included within their Regional Smart Specialisation Strategies (this is a pre-requisite to be included in the Partnership) or of multi stakeholder, industry led, aquaculture clusters then please let us know!
We welcome any thoughts, comments or questions and look forward to hearing from you!
Presenting the new TSSP Smart Circular Aquaculture Platform to the plenary session.
EATiP Annual General Meeting
21th & 22nd of June 2022 – NHOW Hotel, Rue Royale 250, Brussels
Schedule:
DAY 1 – 21th June 2022
- 08:30 – 09:00 Registration
- 09:00 – 12:30 “Smart Specialisation for Sustainable Blue Economy” an Aquaculture Brokerage Event
- 12:30 Lunch for participants
- 14:30 – 18:00 EATiP Annual General Meeting
- Theme 1: Aquaculture to 2030 – The European Policy Context
- Opening Key Note Speech: “Aquaculture Research & Innovation in DG MARE”
- Research and Innovation support for aquaculture within Horizon Europe and the European Missions
- Research and Innovation objectives within the work of the Aquaculture Advisory Council
- Theme 2: Considering industry priorities for research and barriers to innovation uptake.
- Industry Research priorities – a finfish perspective
- Industry Research priorities – a shellfish perspective.
- Aquaculture, Nature Based Solutions and addressing wider aquatic ecosystem research needs
- Identified research priorities within other aquaculture networks: the work of SCAR-Fish, EFARO and KBBE networks.
- Theme 3: Effective interactions within the new research and innovation landscape: applying innovation to ensure collaboration and common goals in the Blue Bio Economy
- EATiP & AquaEXCEL 3.0
- Commercialisation of research outputs for industry needs – The JPI & BlueBio Cofund perspective
- Smart Specialisation for the Blue Economy and Aquaculture
- EATiP Mirror Platforms: case studies of regional and inter-regional collaboration
- Theme 1: Aquaculture to 2030 – The European Policy Context
DAY 2 – 22nd June 2022
- 09:30 – 11:30 EATiP General Assembly
- 11:45 – 12:30 Governance Issues (only for EATiP members)
- 14:30 EATiP Mirror Platform Meeting (for mirror platforms and their members only)
Aquaculture gets Smart!
We are delighted to be working with European Commission DG MARE to co host a brokerage event in Brussels, Belgium, on the topic of Smart Specialisation for a Sustainable Blue Economy
The event will take place on the morning 0f 21 June 2022, with participation free and open to all. Further details follow below.
DG MARE has identified smart specialisation strategies (S3) as a key tool to implement the Communication on Sustainable Blue Economy adopted in May 2021.
Accordingly, in coordination with DG REGIO, DG MARE is setting up a smart specialization platform for sustainable blue economy and is organising a series of brokerage events to promote smart specialisation interregional partnerships and blue economy value chains. EATiP have been pro-actively working with DG MARE since the summer of 2021 to ensure that aquaculture is successfully included in this work.
These events will support matchmaking activities in order to:
- facilitate aquaculture and wider blue economy stakeholders’ networking and exchange
- promote the definition of stakeholders’ complementarities and synergies in terms of interregional value chains/partnerships
- support exchange of potential partnership ideas and expression of interest
- share best practices and lessons learned on S3 interregional partnerships set up and implementation
Background to the Overall framework
In May 2021 the Communication on Sustainable Blue Economy (SBE) was adopted as integral part of the European Green Deal.
DG MARE has identified Smart specialisation strategies (S3) as a key tool to implement the Communication. In fact S3 represent a key opportunity, not only to prioritise regional research and innovation investments in blue economy sectors, but also to promote interregional partnerships and blue economy value chains across borders.
Accordingly, DG MARE in cooperation with DG REGIO, is setting up the S3 thematic platform for sustainable blue economy to support interregional partnerships and value chains thus facilitating the cooperation among blue economy 4 helix stakeholders.
Main objective
S3 is a useful tool to support transition towards a sustainable blue economy by creating the necessary innovation ecosystems in Member States and Regions while promoting investments that boost the competitiveness of blue economy sectors.
DG MARE, in cooperation with EATiP is organising this dedicated brokerage session to promote the potentialities of S3 aquaculture interregional partnerships, in particular in the framework of the I3 instrument and the currently open calls.
Target participants
As a multi-stakeholder platform for promotion innovation and research in aquaculture, EATiP is ideally placed to reach out to the target audience for this event. The brokerage session seeks participation from all actors that are part of the smart specialisation quadruple helix stakeholders’ matrix: regional and national authorities, SMEs/start-ups/industry, clusters/business hubs, universities and research institutes, innovation and technological transfer entities and experts on technological transfer/ internationalisation and scale-up.