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3.1.8 Stakeholder Workshop A total of 22 stakeholders attended a stakeholder workshop on February 11th 2014. Annex 13 presents the participant selection process and lists the attendees. The purpose of the workshop was to assess the findings from the public consultation, with a focus on the state of play, drivers and barriers, lines of research, main products and services of the Blue Biotechnology sector. The workshop also included discussion on emerging policy recommendations. The results from the initial desk based research phase and the patent profiling were presented by consortium members, and moderated discussions on the state of play, problems and challenges and drivers and barriers were held. An interactive discussion followed focusing on EU policy options in which stakeholders were asked where they thought the EU could do to address the barriers. Stakeholders were given a list of barriers to Blue Biotechnology (common to all subsectors) and asked to vote on the top three most important barriers. The results of this prioritisation exercise are presented in Table 3.10. Table 3.10 Stakeholder prioritisation of barriers Barrier Type Co-ordination and collaboration Finance Knowledge Regulation Policy Supply / value chains Access to resources Other Infrastructure Technical / equipment Sustainability Number of stakeholder votes 7 6 6 5 4 3 2 2 1 1 0 The top four barriers were explored further and stakeholders were asked to consider the following questions: 1) What is the barrier precisely? 2) How does it impact growth? 3) How can it be overcome? 4) Can you provide good practice examples? The most pertinent points of discussion are noted below. Of particular interest is the interconnectedness of barriers. Top Barrier 1: Coordination and collaboration There was a mixed response to the issue of coordination and collaboration. Some stakeholders noted that coordination is not really an issue as research activities are well coordinated in Europe with a number of networks and clusters in existence. The real issue is a lack of collaboration between investors, industry, SMEs and researchers. However, marine biotechnology activities in Europe need to be mapped to inform where collaboration is needed and to provide information to industry and investors to inform them what opportunities exist in Blue Biotechnology. It was noted that there are some examples of productive relationships between industry and research; Unilever and P&G have open innovation approaches and whilst they do not provide direct investment they do look at the different applications of marine biotechnology, for example the use of marine proteins in ice cream. The recently launched Marine Biotechnology ERA-NET aims to improve coordination between funding bodies and to enable research. 38 Study in support of Impact Assessment work on Blue Biotechnology

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