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that a Venture Capitalist would rather not invest at all. Furthermore, although the European Venture Capital market is a significant source of capital it is about a quarter of its US counterpart, showing a real potential for expansion. Figure 3.4 presents the major European players. Figure 3.4 Capital raised by leading European countries in 201255 Particularly striking is that the UK not only shows the largest number of financings (the size of the bubble), but also the highest Innovation capital raised (which calculates direct capital raisings by the majority of the companies, excluding the largest sector leaders). This shows that companies in the UK are overall more successful at raising their own capital compared to other places in Europe. This would suggest a higher entrepreneurial capacity in the UK in finding the finances to run and/or expand business activities. Germany on the other hand led the amount of Venture Capital raised in Europe with USD 263 million (EUR 192 million), pointing towards a particularly developed market in Germany. 3.1.5 The role of SMEs There is currently no unified directory or inventory of micro- and SMEs in Europe involved in the marine biotechnology and marine bioresources chain. Information is therefore rather incomplete, and the resulting partial view needs to be gained from diverse sources such as lists of attendees or speakers at relevant conferences, e.g. BioMarine56, participants in national and European RTDI programmes, such as FP6, FP7 or Inter-Reg57, and association, industry or regional network directories, such as the Bretagne bioservices Directory58, NetAlgae59 or the BioMarine Resources Directory60. This work remains to be done, but a very preliminary scanning and synthesis of this type of information gives over 140 SMEs involved in different aspects of marine bioresources exploitation and marine biotechnology. Because the picture is incomplete, it is difficult to map the specialisations of SMEs in this area, especially as there are so many streams of activity, from engineering underwater vehicles and robots, to intelligent and high-density robotic screening for bioactivity of marine natural products (MNPs), and many SMEs are drawn to the marine biotechnology area through EU-funded consortium projects, when their core activity has not been Blue Biotechnology directed to that time. In general, however, apart from the micro- and macro-engineering SMEs, those in biological activities tend to support the concept that SME activity in general stops at the industrial adaptation stage of the value chain. 55 Ernst & Young; Biotechnology Industry report 2013 56 Final report, 4th BioMarine Business Convention, Halifax, Canada Sept 9-12 2013 59 See http://www.netalgae.eu/industry-directory.php 60 http://www.biomarine-resources.com/ 57 See Marine Knowledge Gate http://www.kg.eurocean.org/ and CORDIS http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/home_en.html 58 http://critt-sante.org/vars/fichiers/Bretagne innovation annuaire.pdf 24 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology

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