Funding Opportunity / 

The Blue Economy Challenge

The aquaculture industry is a vital producer in the global fish market— it accounts for nearly half of the fish we eat. However, many of the industry’s practices are environmentally and economically unsustainable. With the AU$3 million dollar Blue Economy Challenge, we aim to crowdsource the world to find solutions to three important issues of aquaculture 1) Rethinking feed for aquaculture 2) New ocean products and 3) Sustainable design.


Beginning 29 February and through 30 June 2016, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), in partnership with Conservation X Labs, SecondMuse, NineSigma, and the World Wildlife Fund, invites innovators, designers, entrepreneurs, businesses, technologists, and scientists to help us revolutionize the relationship between aquaculture and conservation. 

The goal of the challenge is to encourage innovations that will revolutionize aquaculture in the developing world. The focus is on developing or adapting solutions for the Indian Ocean region, where transformations in aquaculture can help eradicate poverty, end hunger, and preserve ecosystems.

Learn more about the challenge here and use the hashtag #BlueRevolution to encourage others to submit their ideas and technologies.

Awards will be made for innovations in two categories: 1) Early Stage/Design and Validation (up to AU$250,000) and 2) Late Stage/Positioning for Scale (AU$250,000-750,000). 

Image: Alex Dehgan / Conservation X Labs

The Challenges:

  1. Create highly nutritional aquaculture feed replacements that match or improve on the cost and nutritional performance of existing feedstock while reducing the burden on the natural environment. New feed replacements should eliminate or dramatically minimise their impact on wild fish stocks and other environmental systems and not use agricultural products used for human consumption. Feed replacements should have equal or greater nutritional value per dollar compared to commercially available fishmeal.
  2. Create new ocean products that vastly expand the diversity, sustainability, and quality of aquaculture products to meet growing food security needs while decreasing aquaculture’s environmental footprint. Solutions must explicitly address the environmental sustainability and consumer acceptance of the products. 
  3. Introduce new designs, methodologies, products and other innovations that are financially and environmentally sustainable, scalable, and will dramatically improve the efficiency of aquaculture farms thereby improving productivity, livelihoods, and market value. Solutions must be an entire aquaculture system design and they must decrease the total system loss compared to benchmarked systems (entries must compare system to status quo even if the solution is novel). These designs could support the uptake of the latest aquaculture farm designs, but in a cost-effective and culturally suitable way for subsistence farmers and small to medium sized aquaculture enterprises in developing countries. Such design improvements may also include improvements in access to a market for their produce, including mechanisms, processes or technologies that can improve post-farm gate activities (i.e. finance, distribution and transport) of aquaculture products.

Application details:

Apply online at http://www.theblueeconomychallenge.com.

All applications must be in English.

Applications are due on 30 June 2016 by 23:59 (Canberra, Australia, GMT +11). 

Awards will be made for innovations in two categories:

  1. Early Stage/Design and Validation (up to AU$250,000);
  2. Late Stage/Positioning for Scale (AU$250,000-750,000).

Questions? Contact Barbara Martinez, Open Innovation Director at Conservation X Labs.