Seaweed aquaculture is the world’s largest and fastest growing aquaculture sector. In Scandinavia and Southeast-Asia, seaweed is cultivated responding to rising market demand. While seaweed is a staple in many East Asian dishes, it remains foreign in many European countries. To that end, a theory-based and industry-oriented framework for service innovation is needed in research and practice. Data collected from field studies and interviews with key stakeholders in the seafood industry is used towards an informed discussion of innovation as a process of searching and the recombination of existing elements, factors or components. These elements are usually commercially available, some with long historical use that evolve by employing different techniques and processes. In the early Viking era, seaweed washed ashore during stormy seasons was gathered and used to produce glass, fertilizer and feed. More recently, seaweed has been commercially harvested for over 70 years in Scandinavia to produce alginate. However, seaweed as a culinary resource has for the most part been overlooked in Scandinavia.
Ambidextrous Innovation Model
In this context, the paper presents an ambidextrous innovation model, from empirical observations based on key individuals such as the Belgian pioneering Seaweed Chef Donald Deschagt. His catalysing work is a good example of how seaweed is being (re)introduced into the northern European diet of this ambidextrous combination of industry leadership and gastro-entrepreneurship. He prepared for example, the 2019 Seagriculture dinner, held near his restaurant on September 25-26th 2019 in Ostend.
Noticeable in this setting were the synergies of location, event context and the food. The evening´s dining ambience with a display of familiar seafood dishes such as the Spanish paella, ushered in various novel seaweed products. New seaweed foods presented at dinner introduced diners to novel means of using seaweed in food. The dinner menu items by Deschagt, oyster sea buckthorn with sea fennel and North Sea grey shrimp with sea lettuce and cheese, combined familiar ingredients with the relative unfamiliarity of seaweed. Innovative plating techniques such as using a brush of seaweed pesto in the bowl or on plates, sparked the interest of the participants of Seagriculture 2019. The very idea is for others be inspired by the event to try their own hand at using seaweed at home.
Innovation comes often with a vision and purpose. For Deschagt that exemplifies the ambidextrous innovation model in practice. The idea is for consumers in the New Nordic cuisine to not even notice that half of the time there was seaweed in the dishes. For gastro-entrepreneurs like Deschagt, the mission is to make the wonderful world of seaweed accessible to everyone. To drive home Deschagt´s point, the wakame infused chocolate ice-cream was a great success at the conference, demonstrating that even a perfectly familiar treat can be enhanced with seaweed to give that element of “spennende” (Norwegian for “exciting”).