Is Growth Always the Goal?

A good idea or a clever piece of technology is only the starting point. What determines whether it goes any further is often far less glamorous: people, space, funding, regulation, weather, access to testing – and sometimes the simple question of whether a company wants to grow at all.

That was one of the clearest lessons from MarTe’s Blue Economy Ecosystem Study Visit to Saaremaa on 27–28 August. Over two days, partners from Estonia and Latvia moved from an aluminium boatyard to marine laboratories, an offshore fish farm and a mussel farm.

Each stop revealed a different obstacle. Sometimes the missing piece was not technology, but skilled people. Sometimes a company needed a place to test an idea before committing to an expensive investment. At sea, solutions developed elsewhere still had to prove themselves in local conditions. And in one case, a scientifically promising idea faced a development step worth half a million euros – with no guarantee that it would work at industrial scale.

Growth is possible. But is it necessary?

At Alunaut, the logic of production is visible the moment you enter the workshop. A boat begins at one end of the hall and gradually moves through different production stages towards the other. The process is organised around the vessel, rather than constantly moving an unfinished boat from one work area to another.

Upstairs, another side of boatbuilding takes shape through engineering, digital drawings and design work. Alunaut specialises in professional aluminium workboats used by police, rescue services, border guards, naval units, ports and research organisations across Europe.

Yet when board member Mark Muru was asked what he would change if he could solve one problem instantly, he did not mention a machine, software or a new technology.

“If I had a magic wand, I’d make more workers appear.”

Skilled labour is one of the company’s most important resources. Alunaut trains people itself, but finding enough qualified workers remains a constraint.

Nor was there one obvious technological gap holding the company back.

Muru has, for example, considered buying a larger 3D printer after discovering that the minimum order for one small component was wildly out of proportion to Alunaut’s own needs. But even that idea ran into a surprisingly ordinary problem: there was nowhere to put the printer.

A more substantial increase in production would require another building comparable to the existing workshop – an investment Muru estimates at around €1 million.

Being able to grow is not the same as wanting to grow.

Asked where he would like Alunaut to be in ten years, Muru did not describe a much larger company. His preference is stability and moderate growth: enough to keep up with inflation and rising costs, while remaining small enough for management to know the people they work with and stay close to day-to-day operations.

For him, that means roughly 25–30 employees. The goal is not growth for growth’s sake. It is having enough work to keep people employed and paid.

A very different obstacle came from Merle Muru, who is responsible for finance and accounting. Asked what would make Alunaut’s daily work easier, she pointed to bureaucracy, including packaging-related accounting and reporting requirements.

“We are drowning in it at the moment.”

For a small company competing internationally, growth is also about trust. According to Mark Muru, around 90% of Alunaut’s turnover comes through tenders, many linked to international markets.

He described trade fairs as a long game. A company may attend for the first time, show its work, meet potential clients – and receive no orders. The second year may bring little more. By the third appearance, however, people begin to recognise you: “You’re still here.”

That continuity matters.

Muru compared boatbuilding to cooking. Everyone may have access to the same ingredients, but the result depends on how they are combined and where the “salt and pepper” are added.

He has seen competitors measure Alunaut boats with tape measures and photograph details at trade fairs. Individual features can be copied. The accumulated knowledge behind them is much harder to reproduce.

Something as fundamental as getting the vessel’s weight distribution and centre of gravity right comes from experience. So does the habit of carrying lessons from one vessel into the next.

If the team discovers that something could have been done better, that knowledge becomes part of the next similar build. Competitive advantage, in this case, grows one boat at a time.

Better to find the problem in the lab than at sea

At TalTech’s Marine Technology Competence Centre in Kuressaare, a Latvian company’s vessel model was being tested in the model basin when we arrived.

We were not allowed to photograph it.

That small restriction said a lot about the facility: this is not simply a teaching space or a demonstration laboratory. Companies use it for real development work, some of it commercially sensitive.

Professor of Marine Structures and Technology Kristjan Tabri showed how reduced-scale vessel models can be tested under different wave conditions before a company commits to building the full-size vessel.

The basin is 60 metres long, five metres wide and three metres deep. Waves are generated at one end and absorbed at the other, allowing researchers to observe how a model behaves under controlled conditions, change the setup and test again.

The value is easy to understand: a full-size ship is an extremely expensive place to discover that an idea does not work as expected.

Model testing moves part of that uncertainty to an earlier stage, when making changes is still easier and cheaper. Companies do not need to build such testing capacity themselves. They can bring a developing solution to Kuressaare and work with researchers and engineers before a potential design problem becomes an expensive problem on a real vessel.

The same principle applies in the material laboratories, where materials can be exposed to moisture, salt, temperature changes, vibration and mechanical loads. Processes that might take years to reveal weaknesses in real-world use can be accelerated under controlled conditions.

The laboratory does not build the final product for the company. What it does is help answer difficult questions before the answers become expensive.

At Kuressaare College, we also saw experiments with algae-based materials. One line of research explores how locally available algal biomass could be turned into new bio-based materials.

That introduced another, less visible part of innovation: knowing that something worked in one laboratory does not mean it can automatically be reproduced elsewhere. A scientific paper may describe the method, yet practical details can remain unwritten. Some knowledge only emerges through trying, failing, adjusting and trying again.

A laboratory built for questions that have not been asked yet

At Kõiguste, research is woven into everyday life by the sea.

Yachts and fishing boats share the harbour with camper vans and tents. Children play near the restaurant while researchers move between laboratories and the shore. In the same small area, people can eat, use the sauna, repair a boat or spend the night by the water.

In the middle of it all sits the Kõiguste field station of the Estonian Marine Institute at the University of Tartu – an understated coastal setting for advanced marine research.

Professor of Marine Ecology and Head of the Department of Marine Systems Jonne Kotta spoke about the station in unusually long-term terms.

For him, Kõiguste should not be built around one scientist, one project or even one generation. Knowledge, infrastructure and responsibility need to be shared so that future researchers can continue the work rather than starting again from zero.

That long view is visible in the way the station has developed. A larger laboratory opened in 2013. In spring 2026, a new experimental building with 16 mesocosms was added. Together with improved working and accommodation facilities, the investment amounted to around €1.3 million, with roughly half generated by the institute through research projects and contract work.

The new mesocosm facility was introduced by Associate Professor of Marine Systems Francisco Barboza.

He started with the word itself. Meso refers to an intermediate scale. Cosmos is a world or a system. A mesocosm is therefore something between a laboratory aquarium and the open sea: a small, controlled world that is still complex enough to observe how organisms and ecosystems respond to change.

One of the most striking features at Kõiguste is the ability to connect experiments to what is happening outside the laboratory.

Sensors around the field station monitor conditions in the sea. Those patterns can then be recreated inside the mesocosms. Researchers can follow the temperature changes taking place in the real sea and then shift the entire pattern several degrees higher.

In other words, they can take today’s sea and ask: what if this same day were warmer?

Rather than exposing organisms to one fixed temperature, researchers can reproduce the natural fluctuations of the real environment and then test how the ecosystem might respond under a future warming scenario.

Barboza considers the Kõiguste facility one of the best of its kind in Europe, in part because researchers were able to shape the laboratory around the experiments they wanted to conduct.

That sounds simple until you look at the details.

During the tour, Barboza pointed to electrical connections hanging from the ceiling and recalled the amount of head-scratching they had caused the electricians. The system needed to remain safe while allowing connections to be moved depending on the design of an experiment.

“The laboratory should adapt to the experiment, not the experiment to the laboratory.”

Barboza’s own route to Kõiguste is also a story about people.

Originally from Uruguay, he had planned to move to Canada when the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted those plans. Looking instead towards Europe, he made a list of five researchers he most wanted to work with.

Jonne Kotta was number one.

That contact eventually brought Barboza to Estonia, where he now works at the University of Tartu.

His story also reinforces Kotta’s point about continuity. Sustainable innovation is not created by infrastructure alone. It depends on communities in which one generation can build on the knowledge, facilities and relationships created by the previous one – and leave something useful for the next.

Offshore fish farming: learn first, scale later

Near Veere harbour, Redstorm raises rainbow trout in offshore sea cages. Board member Fred Siimpoeg took us out by boat to see the farm.

Only a few days earlier, a strong storm had hit Saaremaa. The evidence was still visible: among other damage, three solar panels at the farm had been broken.

For Siimpoeg, farming at sea is an ongoing learning process.

Every season and every period of severe weather tests the anchors, cages, nets and other equipment. Solutions that work elsewhere cannot simply be copied and assumed to behave the same way in Estonian waters.

Nature adds its own variables.

Seals are among the biggest challenges because they can damage the cages. Redstorm uses acoustic deterrents to keep them away.

“The most dangerous ones are the old seals that can no longer hear very well.”

Jellyfish have not caused Redstorm problems on the same scale, but Siimpoeg pointed to fish farms elsewhere that use bubble curtains – barriers of rising air bubbles designed to help keep jellyfish away from cages.

Even successfully growing the fish does not eliminate risk.

At the end of the season, cages containing fish have to be towed towards the harbour. The net extends deep below the surface, and during the journey it must not catch on the seabed or an underwater obstacle.

Finnish fish-farming guidance treats this as a specific operational risk. In Kuivaniemi, for example, an estimated 50 tonnes of rainbow trout escaped from a farm being moved from the sea towards the harbour in autumn 2023. The losses were estimated at around €600,000.

Redstorm’s current location has one major advantage: it is close to the harbour and relatively sheltered from wind in three directions.

The cages are less than a kilometre away, allowing staff to reach them regularly. According to Siimpoeg, the fish are currently fed twice a day.

The company’s next step would be very different.

A planned future farming area lies in much more exposed waters, around eight kilometres offshore. The current working model cannot simply be repeated on a larger scale. With more fish, greater distance and harsher exposure, automated feeding becomes a practical necessity.

There is a limit to how many additional people and boats can solve the problem.

Moving further offshore also makes better environmental information increasingly valuable.

We asked Siimpoeg whether Redstorm could make use of the ice-field forecasting approach being developed within MarTe. His answer was yes.

Although the fish and cages are removed from the water for winter, anchoring systems remain in place, and offshore infrastructure is still exposed to ice conditions.

TalTech’s work within MarTe combines satellite and in-situ observations to improve understanding and forecasting of how ice fields move and change under particular wind and current conditions, including their interaction with offshore infrastructure.

For Redstorm, that connects directly to a practical reality: the further offshore operations move, the more valuable it becomes to anticipate risks instead of learning about them only after something has already broken.

Mussels can clean the sea. Can they also make business sense?

Near Veere’s offshore fish cages, blue mussels are also being cultivated.

Indrek Adler, one of the owners of marine aquaculture company Aqua Verde, explained the challenge behind them.

Mussels attach themselves to cultivation ropes and filter the surrounding water as they grow. Nitrogen and phosphorus become bound in their biomass. When the mussels are harvested and removed from the sea, part of those nutrients leaves the marine environment with them.

That makes mussel farming potentially useful for reducing nutrient loads.

But environmental value does not automatically create a viable business.

The ropes need to be maintained. Mussels need to be grown and harvested. Biomass needs to be processed. All of this costs money.

If the harvested mussels can only be sold as a low-value raw material, for example for feed, the income may not be enough to cover those costs.

The Baltic Sea adds another complication.

Because of its low salinity, local mussels remain relatively small, with a limited edible fraction compared with the shell. That makes it difficult to compete with the larger mussels commonly sold for human consumption.

Adler is therefore looking for ways to create more value from the harvested biomass.

One example he highlighted was glycogen, a compound found in mussels that is also used in cosmetic products. Other possible applications exist, but the underlying question remains unresolved: what can be extracted or produced from Baltic mussels that is valuable enough to make cultivation economically worthwhile?

And even if a promising answer is found in the laboratory, another hurdle follows.

The process then has to be tested at a scale that begins to resemble real production.

Adler gave a simple illustration of the problem: such a next-stage test could require an investment of around €500,000 while still carrying only about a 50% chance of success.

At that stage there is no proven industrial process and no guaranteed business case, making it difficult to attract private investment.

In Adler’s view, this is exactly the point where suitable funding instruments are needed: in the risky space between a promising laboratory result and industrial-scale production.

There is no single recipe

After two days in Saaremaa, one conclusion stood out: blue economy innovation does not have one universal bottleneck.

Every organisation we visited was at a different point in the journey. One needed skilled people and production space. Another offered the infrastructure needed to test an idea before it became expensive. At Kõiguste, the emphasis was on building knowledge and research capacity that could outlast individual projects and generations. Redstorm was learning how technology behaves in a particular sea. And in mussel farming, a scientifically useful process still needed an economic reason to exist.

The solutions therefore look less like a standard recipe and more like tailoring.

The important question is not only what new marine technology should be developed. It is also where promising ideas get stuck – and what combination of knowledge, infrastructure, funding, regulation or cooperation is needed to move each of them forward.

That is where MarTe’s role comes in: bringing researchers, companies and public-sector organisations from Estonia and Latvia into the same conversation, so that promising ideas have a better chance of making the journey from research and development to solutions that actually work at sea.