26th International Association for Management of Technology Conference - IAMOT 2017

**Introduction/purpose** - The study presented in this paper origins from the European Project “Benthis” (WP7, Task 7.4. - Subtask 7.4.4. - Innovative management scenario’s), and it is aimed to analyze costs and benefits of the substitution of otter boards built with traditional technology with innovative and more sustainable ones in bottom trawl fishery, in the Mediterranean Adriatic Sea, Italy. Italian fishing fleet is second in Europe for number of vessels and total power and fourth for gross tonnage (Cariola et al., 2014). The bottom trawling fishing with otter boards (19% of the Italian fishing fleets) is the most impacting on environment because is both a high energy intensive, with heavy fuel costs, and a high environmental impact fishing method. The growing public awareness on those two topics leads to the development of experimental technologies which can bring both low environmental impacts and fuel efficient fishing activities: in the case here analyzed, new otter boards. Their performance can be further improved matching them to digital acoustic technologies for bottom trawling nets monitoring, to control fishing gears performance and the amount of fish caught. The purpose of the research was to assess whether innovative otter boards, which are able to reduce the impact on marine ecosystem, would also result economically sustainable for fishermen, in order to assess the possibility of implementation of such innovations in the fishing industry. **Methodology** – First, the data collected in technical test carried out on vessels, were re-elaborated in a statistical survey in order to obtain suitable information for the economic study of the assessment implementation cost-effectiveness of the innovative gear. The methodology used for this study is based on the construction of a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) often used to evaluate various options for investment in the fishery sector (Mokua et al., 2014; Crilly and Esteban, 2013). We used it to estimate the net present value of the hypothetic investment of the tested gears in a private investor view. The CBA has been used to assess whether the change in technology with the implementation of an innovative otter boards could be a feasible and profitable investment. It was considered the substitution of the old technology with the new one, and all its related costs and benefits, in terms of actual cash flows generated in a time period of 10 years. **Findings** The results of the CBA indicate that, standing at the data of the testing period with the hypothesis of no other factors occurred in the reduction of fuel purchasing per day at sea, the innovative otter boards are cost effective for the vessel studied. The benefit in swapping the technology are enough to exceed the cost of the investment operations. Based on the estimation of this study the whole cost in swapping the technology would be returned with a pay back after 100 days at seas, so already during the first year of the new technology implementation. **Closing** Notwithstanding the good results of tests and CBA, these new efficient technologies need to overcome "human behavior barriers" to be implemented massively in the sector. Difficulties in implementing technological improvements in the fishing sector could be related to some barriers; i.e. absence of information on technology themselves, such as lacks in gear performance results, fuel savings and environmental benefits (Suuronen et al., 2012), but also to a low capacity of managing these new technology. The present study intended to gather new information useful to overcome these kind of barriers.