€4m to support marine knowledge sharing in society
The European Commission has announced an investment of nearly €4m into a major Blue Growth Co-ordination and Support Action (CSA) project designed to ensure that outputs arising from publicly funded marine research projects have positive societal benefits.
The ‘Monitoring, Managing and Transferring Marine and Maritime Knowledge for Sustainable Blue Growth’, or COLUMBUS project, will run for three years until 2018 and involves 26 partners from across Europe. Those involved are managing knowledge and carrying out knowledge transfer of marine research outputs to increase their uptake and application by different end users, such as industry, policy makers and society.
Co-ordinating the project is Bord Iascaigh Mhara, the Irish state agency for seafood development, whilst the Irish SME AquaTT designed and wrote the project. Speaking about COLUMBUS, David Murphy, AquaTT general manager and strategic and operational leader for the CSA venture said: “The EC has made significant investments in marine and maritime research and innovation projects spread across different programmes.
“Recent efforts have been made to monitor and facilitate access to information on these projects and their results. However, key tangible outputs are not always known or exploited when they could be of use to marine and maritime stakeholders, scientists and policy makers. COLUMBUS has been specifically designed to address this deficit.”
AquaTT has previously participated in 17 projects under the Seventh Framework Programme.
