How piggybacking on larger players became a route to success for two cities

Faced with the challenge of needing to organise a Blue Growth Entrepreneurship Programme, the city of Salerno, in Italy, cleverly opted to piggyback off the back of an existing entrepreneurship competitions that operated in their city, rather than go it alone.

An article by Jim Sims, Lead Expert for the BluAct Transfer Network

Rather like the Remora Fish, which hitches a ride on larger fish to benefit from using their host for protection and reach, the two cities chose to work with partners to organise their blue growth entrepreneurship competition.

Working as part of the BluAct Transfer Network - a sustainable urban development initiative supported by the URBACT Programme – the two cities were charged with the challenge of transferring a good practice in Blue Economy Entrepreneurship (the Piraeus’ Blue Growth Initiative) to their own cities.

Here’s their story.

The BluAct Transfer Network

BluAct is a Transfer network of 7 European port cities including Piraeus, Mataro, Ostend, Galati, Matosinhos, Burgas and Salerno aiming to share good practices in Blue Economy entrepreneurship.

The project follows the success of Piraeus’ Blue Growth Initiative, an entrepreneurship competition that offers incubation services to local businesses boosting innovation and job creation. Through an approach of creating Urbact Local Support Groups and engaging local stakeholders and other interested parties, with the ultimate aim of starting up the blue economy, BluAct aims to deliver far reaching results in the respective partner cities.

The City of Piraeus has developed the good practice, which is now in its sixth year of operation. The transferring cities are able to adapt the Piraeus Good Practice to suit their particular economic conditions and circumstance.

Partnering with larger, more established competitions

Faced with the challenge of needing to organise a Blue Growth Entrepreneurship competition, but recognising that both cities already had well established Business Plan Competitions, the city of Mataro, in Spain, and Salerno, in Italy, opted to work with the existing competitions, to create a Blue Growth Entrepreneurship category.

In the case of the City of Mataro, it chose to work with Tecnocampus, the organiser of the local Cre@tic Awards, which is a Business Plan competition which has been run in the city for a number of years. Similarly, Salerno opted to work with Confindustria Salerno, as part of the Premio Best Practices per l'Innovazione Competition, which is now in its 13^th year of being run.

This approach to partnership working had a number of significant advantages, ensuring the fledgling Blue Growth Competition achieves widespread reach, can piggyback on the organisation of a larger competition and de-risks the challenge of obtaining good quality applications.

In the case of Mataro, they adapted their plans further as they progressed through the competition, to organise their own award ceremony, with the Cre@tic awards acting as a feeder for their own competition.

Winners of the Mataro Awards included;

VIENTO EN POPA 365 - A franchisable boat repair & refit workshop
YACHT WORK LIST - An application that facilitates communication between superyachts, management companies, refit shipyards and contractors in general.
IOT ELÈCTRIC - An electric boat propulsion system, which is much more environmentally friendly, quieter and simpler.

Winners of the Salerno competition included three start-ups;

IMEMS Technology Srl - An innovative startup that designs and produces high end Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with innovative ideas, mostly for navigation and orientation systems.
Dive Circle Srl - A web platform where sea lovers can organize their entire vacation with all the necessary services.
Seares srl – A wave energy generation system.

And one enterprise;

Monotricat Srl – An original naval hull with high hydrodynamic efficiency and energy saving.

Finally, the “web prize” was awarded to the Alberto Pentagallo project which was set up to improve the mobility of people with disabilities on the beaches.

As Sara Petrone, the City Councilor of the Municipality of Salerno responsible for the BluAct project, says of collaborating with the Industrial Union of Salerno, “It helped us reach out to more people, to have the blue economy section of the competition known to as many people as possible and it placed less pressure on us to organize every element of the competition. This was very important to us because, as a local government, we didn't have enough experience regarding it and it helped us to be more credible in this new field of our institutional action. On the whole, the collaboration was a strong success and it also helped the Industrial Union find some new innovation which they needed for this well-established competition.”

Plans are currently being put in place to bring the winners of the different Blue Growth competitions together, as part of a celebration of the work undertaken through the BluAct Transfer Network.

More information

To find out more about the BluAct Network, visit bluact.eu