Arctic Blue Scenarios – The Future of Marine Innovation

Sunday 13th March, 2016 – University Centre of the Westfjords, Ísafjörður, Iceland (@Haskolasetur)

A one day seminar exploring how future change may affect Arctic marine innovation ideas and developments. The workshop is based on linking innovation and foresight methods to help generate insights into the future of our businesses and our society.

Innovation is a hard and messy process and many good innovative ideas will fail, partly because we have not taken into account how our surroundings, our way of thinking and acting and the evolving needs of customers can change over time. Although we look at the world as a whole, in this seminar we focus on the North, the Arctic, and the marine environment.

The maritime zone has long played a crucial and historic role in Arctic affairs involving elements across security, communications, transportation, fisheries, tourism, marine products, aquaculture and food production. Successful and sustainable economic development within the Arctic is seen by many as one of the key challenges of the first half of the 21st century and, as someone interested or actively involved in marine innovation, you’ll be aware of the central role the ‘blue economy’ may have in supporting this. Underlying new development is the process of marine innovation, but it’s recognised such activity may increasingly take place against a backdrop of uncertainty as a result of the significant and evolving processes of change effecting the Arctic region. Exploring how we identify these trends and understand what impacts (both positive and negative) they may have on new business ideas is at the heart of this workshop.

Drawing on the futures methods of arcticfutures and the marine innovation programme of the University Centre of the Westfjords, our aim is to provide a practical but accessible way to introduce ideas on how foresight approaches can be used to create insights to help improve innovation practice and, hence, future Arctic marine business development.

#arcticbluescenarios | #arcticblueeconomy