Success Story #7 — AquaSphere Reaches Across Europe Through Strategic Partnerships
In just six months, the AquaSphere project has confirmed seven strategic partnerships spanning more than fifteen countries across Europe and beyond, including Turkey, Norway, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Cyprus, Malta, Finland, Portugal, Estonia, Croatia, Italy, Bulgaria, and Wales/UK. These collaborations cover offshore wind, coastal water resilience, marine biodiversity, technology transfer, climate action, and regional decarbonisation.
This reach was made possible by a structured Strategic Partnership Development Framework developed by IZTECH, which gave the full consortium a shared methodology for identifying, evaluating, and formalising partnerships. The framework brings together an ecosystem mapping tool, a stakeholder scoring matrix, and standardised collaboration templates including Letters of Intent. It was designed to be both consistent across partners and adaptable to each institution’s local context, ensuring that partnership development could happen in parallel across multiple countries with comparable quality and transparency.
The pace and diversity of these partnerships reflect the strong appetite across the European blue economy community to collaborate, and AquaSphere’s capacity to connect universities, research centres, industry, and regional authorities around shared maritime and water challenges.