Frontier IP, and its Portuguese subsidiary, FIP Portugal, successfully developed a range of tools to support technology transfer across Europe’s Atlantic Blue Economy as part of a major pan-European project backed by EUR 2.8 million in funds.
The four and a half-year project, called Emporia4KT, was launched in March 2019 to strengthen knowledge transfer and value creation and supported by the European Regional Development Fund’s INTERREG Atlantic Area programme. It brought together academic, business, societal and government stakeholders from five countries on Europe’s Atlantic seaboard – Portugal, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. Initially, there were 12 partners and three associate partners involved, but this was later extended to 17 partners and, geographically, to the Canary Islands.
Frontier IP’s role in Emporia4KT was to lead one of the work streams and create risk assessment tools for business projects, including an Attrition Model, to help potential spin outs develop commercialisation road maps for their early-stage technologies and improve their chances of success.
Researchers supported by Emporia4KT and Frontier IP are developing a range of early-stage technologies. Potential spin out companies and ideas include:
- Polivercrete: a technology based on polymer-modified concrete that uses plastic waste ground into a fine aggregate to replace sand in concrete and mortar. The material has the potential to cut plastic pollution and reduce the environmental and social impact of extracting sand.
- Fast and Fishious: is developing environmentally friendlier methods to farm fish. It is also seeking to market farmed and processed golden grey mullet under the brand name Canary Rockcod as a cheap and healthy foodstuff, initially in the Canary Islands.
- Subcritical Water (SCW): the technology recycles waste from processing cod [and other fish] into protein hydrolysate and hydroxyapatite, which have broad applicability in the food and biotechnology industries.
- Floating Bubble Hotel: is looking to create domes on floating platforms for use as hotel accommodation on water.
- WavePlat: the technology converts wave energy into electricity and is designed to support facilities in deep water, such as offshore fish farms. It is modular and can be configured in various ways.
- A further project is exploring the use of metabolites from marine algae for anti-parasitic treatments, especially Naegleria Fowleri parasites, also known as brain-eating amoeba, which has a mortality rate of more than 97 per cent.
- Seafood sustainability index: technology to provide benchmarks for assessing the environmental and societal impact of seafood production. Initial works is to focus on salmon fillets.
Frontier IP also developed a Blue Economy Dashboard to help create a deeper understanding of the data involved and improve the chances of further success. The Dashboard can be found here: https://www.emporia4kt.com/dashboard. Further information about Frontier IP’s involvement can be found in the documents here:
