The EU-backed SELKIE project has designed a detailed industry survey whose aim is to get essential direction on the development of offshore renewable energy innovation systems in Wales and Ireland.
The survey has been tailored to obtain firm-level data on the innovative and networking activities, resource capacities, and performance of firms within the offshore renewable energy (ORE) sector and its potential supply chain.
It is extensive to ensure rich insight can be obtained on many different areas including green innovation, university and government interactions, policy mix characteristics for low-carbon innovation and COVID-19 impacts on current operations.
The information collected will serve as a major milestone in identifying future directions to advance ORE, providing essential direction on the development of ORE innovation systems to maximize socioeconomic growth, energy security as well as developing tools for achieving inclusive and sustainable goals.
“Detailed data collection exercises like this can be cumbersome and require significant research resources and of course, is extremely reliant on the helpful assistance of respondents”, SELKIE project administrators have stated.
Data collection started in December 2020, and it is planned to be completed by end of March 2021.
According to the information from the SELKIE project, the data from almost 100 Irish and Welsh firms has already been collected, while the target is set at 250 firms.
“We are currently experiencing a low response rate due to COVID-19 but we are mitigating it through follow up calls, emails, or MS Team interviews (Questionnaire based). We hope to obtain our target of 250 firm’s by end of March 2021 as the data analysis for the overall project is scheduled to commence in April 2021, with the final report completed by June 2021″, the project administrators said.
This data exercise is also supporting other research papers in the area of innovation value chain analysis and triple helix interactions (government-university-business linkages) which are planned to be completed after the data collection report.
The SELKIE project is led by University College Cork in partnership with Swansea University, Marine Energy Wales, Menter Môn, DP Energy Ireland, and Gavin and Doherty Geosolutions.
The €4.3 million aims to boost the marine energy industry in Wales and Ireland, and is funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
Source: Offshore Energy
