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With its 5,300 miles of coastline, Maine’s connection to the sea has long been ingrained in the state’s psyche — and a linchpin of the state’s economy.
According to a 2025 consultant’s report, ocean-related industries contributed $6.8 billion to the state’s economy and accounted for more than 90,000 jobs in 2021. Yet, efforts to support those businesses have been “energetic but disorganized.”
With the launch of the Maine Center for the Blue Economy at the end of July, that could change.
The new entity, created by the Legislature, aims to leverage Maine’s clean ocean brand to foster jobs, investment, and new business ventures across a range of marine-based sectors. Establishing a state-sponsored economic development initiative focused on ocean-centered industry was the top recommendation of the Blue Economy Task Force, a group of industry, government and institutional stakeholders.
Maine is a latecomer to the “ocean cluster” movement. Rhode Island and Washington are among several states that have sponsored dedicated government initiatives, as have other countries, notably Canada and Iceland.
To replicate the success of ocean economy initiatives elsewhere, Maine’s Center for the Blue Economy will need to attract private and ultimately federal dollars to supplement its modest initial budget of $100,000, barely enough to hire a director and fund startup expenses.
“Innovation cannot move forward without [more] funding,” said Cem Giray, cofounder and CEO of Salmonics. The Brunswick-based biotechnology startup harvests blood from farm-raised salmon to make products used in research, diagnostics, and clinical applications.
“Its success will be determined by whether the center can support and sustain innovation by attracting and creating new investment opportunities for Maine companies,” he said.
Brian Whitney, the president of the Maine Technology Institute (MTI), will oversee the Center for the Blue Economy.
“Without question, additional resources will be needed if the effort is to be successful and sustained,” Whitney said.
The enabling legislation specifies that the center will serve as a “hub for coordinating research, commercialization, patenting, workforce development, and aligning government, industry, and academic efforts.”
“We’ve been working on the innovation ecosystem for a long time, and we’ve done pretty well on the innovation side of the equation,” said Sebastian Belle, who leads the Maine Aquaculture Association. “I’m not sure we’ve done as well as we should on the commercialization side.”
Kittery-based skin care company Cold Current Kelp is the kind of venture the Center for the Blue Economy could help. When cofounder Inga Potter and her partner launched their company from their basements in 2021, it was an uphill climb.
“Maine provides a lot of support on how to start a kelp farm, get a license, build the bones, etcetera, but in terms of developing value-added applications, you’re on your own,” Potter said. “People aren’t waiting at the dock to pay you for your kelp. High-value uses are where the future of the industry lies, but the process of realizing the potential can be expensive and overwhelming. We had to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up.”
Mike Conathan, an ocean specialist who was the lead consultant to the task force effort, said bringing stakeholders together to look for economic development opportunities is something that only a public sector entity can do.
“What we’ve seen in other states is that when that happens, the money follows,” he said.
The model for the new office is the Maine Center for Life Sciences, launched in 2025. Both initiatives fall under MTI, the publicly funded nonprofit set up in 1999 to bolster the state’s “innovation ecosystem” by supporting research and development and commercialization in Maine’s technology sectors.
Over the past five years, MTI awarded $142 million in grants to support the expansion of existing Maine businesses or the launch of new ones, funding that the agency says leveraged $1.56 billion in private sector investment.
Proponents believe Maine could be a leader in emerging marine-related fields that, with a focused strategy and additional resources, could play a much larger role in the state’s economy and workforce.
The Blue Economy Task Force identified five high-potential areas beyond Maine’s robust fisheries and boatyard sectors:
● Aquaculture for food and seaweed-based products
● Biotechnology applications for medicine, cosmetics and agriculture
● Data collection and ocean monitoring for forecasting and climate research
● Innovative boatbuilding techniques that include electric propulsion and novel materials
● New approaches to fortifying coastal infrastructure against rising seas and extreme weather.
Earlier this year, more than 100 people gathered in Portland for a conference about converting seaweed and fish processing byproducts into new pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, animal feed and other products. The Blue Biotech Summit, convened by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and global ocean tech investor Hatch Blue, also served as the culmination of a two-week boot camp on Bigelow’s East Boothbay campus during which teams from 10 early-stage companies got advice from experts.
Participating startups included Kittery-based Atlantic Blue Bio, which is building a biorefinery to formulate skincare products from compounds found in seaweeds, and RuMeverse, a Bigelow Lab spin-out whose kelp-based technology has been shown to improve the health and milk production of dairy cows.
The traditional image of a fish processor wielding a filet knife to cut away edible meat while flinging equal parts of guts, skin and bones to be discarded as waste could become obsolete. A report by the Seafood Economic Accelerator for Maine estimated that the state’s fishing industry generated nearly 30,000 tons of seafood waste in 2020. That waste typically ends up as lobster bait or compost or is discarded in a landfill.
Maine entrepreneurs are pursuing ways to create more value-added products from what fishermen harvest. They are following the lead of Iceland, which has championed the 100% fish movement, and earned a reputation as the “Silicon Valley of fish.” The goal is to transform fisheries from a volume-based to a value-based industry. Examples include using shrimp shells for bone regeneration, fish skins for wound healing, and algae for food coating and bioplastics. South Portland-based Marin Skincare makes its products from glycoproteins derived from a part of lobsters that would otherwise be flushed down the drain.
“There’s so much potential for high-value product creation from fisheries waste, aquaculture, and marine microbes,” said Bigelow’s vice president for research, Beth Orcutt.
Bigelow is part of an increasingly robust nucleus of ocean science research organizations. Others include the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, the Island Institute, the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, MDI Biological Laboratory, and marine programs at Maine Maritime Academy, the University of New England, Bowdoin and Colby Colleges. Together, they are a key ingredient for innovation in Maine’s blue economy.
The task force’s focus on coastal resilience as a driver of economic development sets Maine apart. After a pair of violent winter storms battered the Maine coast in 2023 and 2024, state-level and community leaders began to rethink how to protect shorelines. Many of the federal resources on which Maine and other states have relied to make their coastlines less susceptible to storms and rising sea levels have been drastically diminished. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for lots of innovation, experts say.
Blaine Grimes, who spent two decades at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute before launching Ocean House Consulting, pointed to software, data systems, sensors deployed in the water, and land-based technology among the tools that could help coastal communities create more resilient working waterfronts. She recently met with experts from the University of Maine to explore the use of forestry-based composite materials that could be used for building more resilient piers, retaining walls and other coastal infrastructure.
Maine will have to navigate tensions between uses of the ocean by heritage industries and emerging ones, especially as spiraling property values take a toll on coastal access. A 2023 report by the Island Institute calculated that less than 20 miles of the state’s 5,000-mile coastline between Kittery and Calais could be classified as working waterfront.
“We look out at the ocean and we see expanses of blue water. In fact, the coastal ocean is a crowded space with a lot of different users today,” said former Maine state economist Charles Colgan, who helped pioneer the field of ocean economics. “It’s going to become a more crowded space with more demands for its use. Governments are going to have to make some allocation decisions.”
The first task of the Center for the Blue Economy will be data collection and tracking, Colgan said. Only by measuring jobs, investment, and economic output for both traditional marine industries and emerging sectors will it be possible to know whether the economic growth strategy is working, he said.