Marine Clusters/ North Atlantic Ocean Cluster Alliance
The NORA area is vast, and the distances—between people, firms and expertise—are great. This can make working together and learning from each other difficult, but it is far from impossible.
The North Atlantic covers approximately 5.7% of the world’s marine area. At the same time, its richness as a fishery (measured in ‘catch per unit effort’) was 2.3 times higher than the global average in 2011. In other words: its potential is just as vast as its area. Part of this potential lies in the existing industrial clusters. Although related businesses have always tended to gather together, cooperation among industries and across national borders is a newer idea. The logic is that closer cooperation between these clusters of firms can benefit the economies of the North Atlantic, both directly and indirectly, in the form of knowledge-transfer and new opportunities for doing business.
This project sought to put this idea into action by bringing leaders from established clusters and industries together to share best practices and undertake new initiatives. The expectation was that bringing clusters together would create economies of scale and improve market access. At the same time, the project sought to reinforce the identity of the maritime industry by identifying experience, knowledge-exchange and trust as shared traits.
The first step towards these goals was to bring these clusters together into a network. The task required mapping existing clusters and then identifying barriers within their industries. The selling point was to be the expanded opportunities for collaboration that the network would afford. The idea was floated at conferences and in a final report compiled as part of the project. The report contained proposals for how to remove barriers to collaboration among North Atlantic marine clusters.
Ultimately, the project resulted in clusters working together on initiatives related to green energy and to oil and gas, as well as other topics, but it had been slow to gather speed, and, in 2014, it seemed the newly renamed North Atlantic Ocean Clusters Alliance (NAOCA) would end up with nothing more to show for it than closer networks and some good intentions. More recently, though, marine-cluster networks appear to be moving in the direction the project intended, according to Thór Sigfússon, the project manager.
“We realised that there was great potential in collaborating across borders—not least on development of the blue economy,” Mr Sigfússon says. “We haven’t evaluated how much collaboration has come out of the project; we plan to do that in 2026. But what we can say is that the ocean-cluster movement—now 11 clusters across five continents—is a result of its work. We have been lucky and have received fantastic global interest in our work with clusters. We learned a lot through the NAOCA project, and that helped us grow. I would have liked to have had Greenland as a member. We were close in 2017, and I’d still like to get them on board. If that happens, it will be a big step in the right direction.”
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