The current ocean innovation pipeline primarily serves the defense and fossil fuel industries, which has been driven by declining public funding for the ocean sciences. As a result, this pipeline is also failing to create solutions for the most urgent issues facing the oceans: warming, acidification, overfishing, sea-level rise, plasticization, pollution, and more. Furthermore, sustainability for the oceans is only an incremental step towards mitigating, rather than solving, these problems. The blue economy needs to be regenerative, with a tangible, solutions-based focus that reverses detrimental anthropogenic impacts. Seaworthy Collective was created to address the systemic failures to catalyze solutions for the oceans’ greatest problems and build a community of current and aspiring ocean innovators and entrepreneurs called Sea Change Makers.
Seaworthy Collective empowers this community through building up its mentor and collaborator network, bringing together thought-leading mentors and strategic collaborators to build up our community’s resources and expertise. Using this network, we host monthly inspirational and educational panels to empower our diverse and interdisciplinary community.
Starting in 2021, Seaworthy announced its Opportunities for Sea Change – six key areas of opportunity for building a regenerative blue economy as collective systems of solutions. This lead to launching our venture studio that co-creates startups by building the initial team, providing strategic direction, and attracting capital for the startup to reach product-market fit. At Seaworthy Collective we look to tailor our venture studio towards developing collective systems of regenerative ocean solutions. We’re officially accepting applications for potential co-founders for co-created startups in the areas identified in the Opportunities for Sea Change, while also seeking current startups in these areas to get involved in our pitch competition.
The pitch competition offers a platform for co-created startups from the venture studio and other existing ocean startups to get into the pipeline for the ocean focused incubator/accelerator programs we’ll be launching later in the year. We are looking to partner with existing incubators/accelerators to leverage their core programming and help tailor it to serve the regenerative blue economy.
Furthermore, at Seaworthy Collective, we believe in creating sincere and positive relationships with our strategic collaborators & mentors as we move forward in our vision of empowerment for ocean science, conservation, and exploration, as well as the blue economy as a whole. Being a part of the Conservation Optimism community would help us keep inspiring and empowering Sea Change Makers while exchanging experiences, sharing knowledge, resources and connecting interdisciplinary innovators from all around the globe for one unique and powerful mission: make the positive changes our ocean needs through regenerative impact. Our community is welcome to everyone who has a vision for the ocean; we embrace both optimism and realism, hope, inspiration, and determination for making the next wave of sea change.