About the Finfish Project

The FAO has projected that by 2030 an additional 37 million tones of fish per year will be required to supply global demand. Due to the inability to increase supply from wild capture sources, the only feasible source is aquaculture.

Globally, aquaculture systems are simply not capable of sustainably filling the forecast shortfall. This is a world scale problem that requires world-class solutions. It also presents a major entrepreneurial opportunity that organisations around the world are beginning to recognise and organise themselves to exploit. This project has been initiated to help create sustainable solutions to the projected global fish production gap.

The purpose of this page is to provide information that will enable people and organisations to review and choose to participate in this project.

The initiators of the project are located in Perth, Western Australia. We expect the community of interest participating in this project to be global. To facilitate communication, collaboration and innovation amongst geographically dispersed participants, the project will be operate via a Web Connect Cluster. The project will also include several Innovation Roadmapping Workshops, the first of which will be run in Perth, around end March 2008. Everyone can participate in the project and we commit to give you opportunities to contribute and create value.

The objective is to create productivity transforming innovations that underpin the ability to nucleate and grow world leading finfish aquaculture ventures. The focus is high quality finfish for the world’s most demanding markets. This project is about ‘finfish innovation’ because to transform productivity to meet the scale of unmet demand, significant innovation is required.

The term ‘innovation’ may create some misunderstandings. This is most often the case because people use it loosely and to mean different things. To help communicate clearly about the scope and intent of this project we define the term and identify the aspects of innovation that forms the project focus.

We use the term innovation to mean:

the process whereby new ideas are transformed, through economic activity, into a sustainable value-creating outcome

If we adopt this definition, there are several activities which can fit. As illustrated in Figure 1, innovation can relate to either exploration, explanation or exploitation activities. In the context of this project, these terms mean:

• Exploration is what is referred to as the ‘front end’ of the innovation process. During exploration, work is conducted to enhance the quality of opportunities and the amount of knowledge available to assist people to understand how best to address them
• Explanation is the process of conducting research and development to generate ‘proof of concept’ that a solution can in-fact be developed to realise the opportunity and to understand how the solution works
• Exploitation is the commercialisation of the identified opportunity using the solution.

The focus of the Finfish Aquaculture Project is Exploration … the planning and strategy required to uncover productivity transforming aquaculture innovations. We will focus our efforts on the very front end of the finfish aquaculture innovation process. Through these efforts we will create an aquaculture innovation system that delivers breakthrough performance in both in productivity and probability for transforming significant opportunities into sustainable and valuable new businesses.

We will iteratively identify valuable trends, create entrepreneurial concepts, test and build ventures that can attract investment and succeed in the world’s most competitive markets. The output will be independent ventures that have received investment and are growing towards their next funding rounds, delivering exceptional outcomes for their customers and investors.

Our objective is to use front end innovation insights to design success into projects from their very outset. We will convert unstructured thinking into disciplined processes that promote creativity and the definition of successful business strategies. We will focus here because this is where projects are most uncertain and where most value can be created.

Figure 1: Finfish Project Focus

What We Plan to Do

We will use a number of approaches during the project to assist us to achieve our stated front end innovation objective:

• Innovation Roadmapping
• Technology Mining
• Open Innovation
• Collaboration for Innovation

These approaches are described in more detail below.

Innovation Roadmapping

Innovation Roadmapping is a form of strategic planning for innovation. We will use the Finfish Innovation Roadmap to help identify where the most important finfish projects are likely to emerge and to prioritise them.

The Roadmapping process will capture information and knowledge about innovation and present it on a timeline. The information and knowledge will include topics such as: objectives, strategies, market requirements, product or service plans, technology plans, performance metrics and capability plans. The timeline will be the present day to 2030.

Innovation roadmapping is a four step process:

• developing an understanding of the major changes impacting an industry
• looking at the structure of the market and the relative positioning of participants
• creating a technology landscape by looking at how the most important value creating technologies are likely to be developed and used in aquaculture business
• once this is achieved, it is possible to analyse how the changes identified in the first step may lead to shifts in the needs or requirements of the marketplace. This helps expose the innovation efforts most likely to lead to valuable results.

To systematise how we assess where innovations might make a strong impact on finfish aquaculture we have defined an aquaculture value system. The finfish aquaculture value system is described in more detail here.

Figure 2: Finfish Aquaculture Value System

An innovation roadmapping process focuses on evaluating marketplace needs as they shift in response to the forces of change. By making a deliberate effort to dissect and understand the ‘market’, ‘technology’ and ‘change’ components of aquaculture, we maximise the likelihood that our investments will be directed towards innovations likely to have the greatest impact on productivity advancement. We will systematise our assessment of productivity-transforming innovations by considering each component of the value system in Figure 2. To be clear, while incremental improvements will be valued, the intent of this project is to bring to light significant innovations that will make industry-transforming contributions to aquaculture productivity.

Technology Mining

Technology mining describes the process of distilling insights from large data sets to develop a clear picture of innovation activities occurring world wide. We will use technology mining to inform our innovation roadmapping activities by analysing data from journals, conference proceedings and patents.

Ordinarily, technology roadmapping programs invite a group of knowledgable people to attend a workshop. The Workshop draws on their input to help shape a set of decisions about innovation.

The use of expert opinion is certainly laudable, particularly when compared to the alternative of uninformed arbitrary choices (guessing). However, with advancements in computing power, sophisticated software and data organisation we can now do much better than this. By using this rich base of information we can gain insights into what is happening world wide in finfish aquaculture innovation and more importantly in other areas of innovation that could be usefully applied to aquaculture (for example, intensive agriculture, manufacturing or genetics). The data and tools to analyse this information will be used as a core of our Innovation Roadmapping process.

Technology Mining will inform participants where innovation efforts are positioned against what others are doing to identify novel approaches, locate potential collaborators and identify the best option for commercialising the most promising applications. Participants will have the opportunity to consider a rich innovation landscape, backed by explicit information. They will be afforded a major competitive advantage over any one else making investment decisions based solely on intuition.

Open Innovation

Application of the practice of Open Innovation is making a significant impact on the ability to develop new products and services and create competitive advantages.

Open Innovation is usually described by comparison with its opposite: closed innovation. Used to describe the practice of keeping innovation efforts inside an organization, closed innovation refers to an industrial company that introduces only those new products developed by employees within its own R&D department as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Closed Innovation

By contrast, open innovation is about trading innovation components into and out of an organisation across its semi-permeable boundary as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Open Innovation

Open innovation practices have been promoted by economic trends such as the increased cost of R&D, escalating technological complexity, the increased tendency for valuable inventive steps to occur at the interface between fields of knowledge (such as bio-informatics or materials-electronics) and enhanced communication via telecommunications, travel and the internet.

Open innovation practices draw together the components of a new product or service from a number of sources, including those external to the innovating organisation. One of the most memorable statements used when describing open innovation is “not all the smart guys work for us.” That is, it is possible to take advantage of the opportunity to access ’smart guys’ (not employed by you) to help build your business.

There are many and varied means to access the other smart guys. Alternative transaction types you might consider include:

• consultancy
• contract R&D
• technology licensing
• alliance
• joint venture
• acquisition or merger

The result of the transaction is that you have defined rights to make use of some knowledge or intellectual property or capability that you did not have before.

Open innovation concepts provide the means for identifying and then deploying innovation components or capabilities that when assembled appropriately will create the ‘whole solution’ for a customer. Click the link for additional information about Open Innovation.

Through participating in the innovation roadmapping and technology mining phases of the project, participants will gain a contemporary view of the most important capabilities around the world important to making significant advances in finfish aquaculture productivity.

Collaboration for Innovation

The future belongs to those who collaborate.

By adopting open innovation frameworks and a Web Connect Cluster, we will have the ability to realistically scale the number of participants to hundreds or even thousands of people and organisations around the globe. The value-added insights of combining global technology mining landscapes with the practical insights of a large and deep community of interest holds the potential to deliver best-in-class insights to Finfish Innovation project participants.

The nature of communication and collaboration will determine the quality of the productivity transforming innovation breakthroughs this project will deliver. We have devised a Web Connect Cluster to support global communication as a critical aspect of this project; however, the technology forms a very small part of the picture – far more important is the range of new forms of communication that the finfish aquaculture innovation process will deliver to participating individuals and teams.

The finfish.org Web Connect Cluster provides the communications hub for all issues associated with the finfish aquaculture innovation project and subsequently to the individual projects and their participants.

Outcomes

The finfish aquaculture innovation roadmap will identify projects required to achieve the major productivity stretch objectives required to fill the FAO fish production gap.

As the project moves from Exploration through to Explanation and Exploitation phases (Figure 1), those who have made contibutions towards the innovation roadmapping effort will have established their credentials to play key roles within a relevant project or projects that emerge. Projects will form and participants will be sought to undertake the work required to bring projects to realisation. We will focus our efforts on creating platforms that help people to mobilise the appropriate resources to plan, initiate and realise projects.

Networked creators with specialised and distributed resources will come together to accelerate capability building, to learn and to innovate to build productivity transforming finfish aquaculture projects. Collaborative efforts will be established to undertake high priority projects. More about the importance of collaboration in innovation is available here.

If you are interested in participating or just want to monitor what’s going on then there a few actions you can take straight away:

• First, scroll up to the base of the sidebar on the right hand side of this page to enter your details to receive Blog updates via email or RSS
• Second, review Recent Posts and Recent Comments in the sidebar to see the newest activity on the site
• Finally, if you determine that you would like to get involved then … Click on the ‘Register’ link towards the base of the sidebar.

Significant additional resources will progressively be made available on the site. We look forward to your participation and engaging with you and your organisation in aquaculture innovation.