The SmartBlue Project consortium held its first meeting in the PLOCAN offices in Taliarte. This project seeks to foster the competitiveness of marine maritime companies in Macaronesia with a network of clusters to promote processes of innovation and international expansion by jointly leveraging synergies, capabilities and resources, and co-ordinating the Canary Island Maritime Cluster (CMC, as it is known in Spanish) as the main beneficiary.

The first part of the project meeting was chaired by the Director of the Canary Island Government’s Research and Innovation Agency, Manuel Miranda, and was attended by the director of PLOCAN, Octavio Llinás and the Chairman of the Marine Sciences Technological Centre (CETEMCIMA, as it is known in Spanish), José Luis Guersi.

SmartBlue Network of regional marine maritime clusters for the SME competitiveness of the blue economy is a project that was approved in the first call for projects of the INTERREG V-A Spain-Portugal MAC (Madeira-Azores-Canaries) co-operation programme 2014-2020. This programme is the main instrument that the outermost regions of Spain and Portugal have to respond efficiently to the common challenges they face in matters of innovation, competitiveness, international expansion and sustainable development.

SmartBlue is part of strand 2, whose objective is to improve the competitiveness of SMEs and the priority of 3.d. investment, support for the capability of SMEs to grow in regional, national and international markets and in processes of innovation. SmartBlue has a budget of €997,086.15, €847,523.23 of which is funded by ERDF, with an execution period of three years.

The project is led by the CMC, working with its partners: CETECIMA, PLOCAN, the Azores Government Regional Science and Technology Fund, the Punta Delgada Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Madeira Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Regional Agency for the Development of Research, Technology and Innovation. It also has participants associated with SmartBay Ireland (an Irish Company that manages the marine renewable energies test bed in Galway Bay), the Azores Regional Department of Sea Affairs and ENAPOR from Cape Verde.