1ST INTERNATIONAL MONACO OCEAN PROTECTION CHALLENGE

The Oceanographic Institute, the Monaco Impact Association and the International University of Monaco present the first International Monaco Ocean Protection Challenge, now open to all school and university students.

The aim of this challenge is to allow students to devote their professional skills, their creativity and their commitment to preserving the ocean in its natural state. It is more than a simple student project; it is intended to raise awareness among students of all the opportunities offered by the new forms of economy (circular, collaborative, organic-based, biomimetism, etc.) and the value of respecting the environment in a professional context.

Two types of challenge are proposed:

• An entrepreneurial challenge, “Innovate to Protect the Oceans”: the aim here is to present an innovative concept for a product or service (“business concept”) that would have a positive effect on the ocean. The project must be studied in detail and presented in the form of a business plan with a market potential study, a needs assessments, user tests or surveys any any other relevant data; these projects may, over time, take the form of start-ups.

• An institutional challenge, “Party without Balloons”: as part of an initiative from the Oceanographic Institute and the Princely Government aiming to propose alternatives to releasing plastic balloons, which are extremely harmful to the ocean, into the atmosphere, we encourage groups to imagine how this best practice could be communicated as widely as possible and to come up with alternatives to releasing balloons, in the form of an awareness and communication campaign.