UNCW’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) held its fourth annual Ocean Innovation Conference Tuesday, highlighting local startups and the blue economy. 

The conference, hosted at UNCW’s Burney Center, drew a crowd of around 300 people, including entrepreneurs, researchers and conservationists. 

John Hardin, executive director for the Office of Science, Technology and Innovation at the N.C. Department of Commerce, shared updates on the 2026 Tracking Innovation report, which, for the first time, ranked North Carolina in the top ten states making strides in innovation. According to the report, which uses 41 measures to rank a state's innovation economy, North Carolina ranks ninth overall. 

Notably, Hardin pointed out that there are geographic disparities in which counties within North Carolina have advanced innovation – with higher-population counties performing better on average. 

“The opportunity for the blue economy is to help spread that out geographically and help spread it out across sectors,” Hardin said Tuesday. 

“Blue tech is growing four times faster than the traditional ocean economy,” he said. 

The conference also included several panels with notable speakers, spanning discussions from responsibly scaling blue tech startups to the role of technology and cybersecurity in the Blue Economy and the growing importance of sustainable food solutions and innovations across seafood and aquaculture. 

This year’s conference also included a startup showcase, featuring the co-founders of Florida-based Smart Seawall Technologies, Christy Swann’s Wilmington-based RCOAST, Mount Olive-based Ceretune and Wilmington-based Deep Marine Innovations. Ceretune, an ecological restoration company creating biodegradable, floating ecosystems, won the pitch competition, based on audience voting.

This year’s keynote speaker, Hanli Prinsloo, a South African freediver and ocean conservationist, highlighted how she let her natural love and understanding of the ocean lead her to create innovative solutions to the problems she encountered.

“For me, that is what entrepreneurship is," Prinsloo said Tuesday. "How are my skills and passions related to the problem?”

Prinsloo is the co-founder of a sustainable freediving brand called AGULHAS and the co-founder and leader of I AM WATER, an ocean exploration and education company. 

The first panel on startups in the blue economy highlighted how founders can turn ideas and solutions into viable businesses and scale. The panel featured Swann discussing her journey to founding RCOAST, Wallace Hogsett of Wilmington-based HurriLab and Joe Cardenas of Telchine Energy Technologies. 

“If you want to scale a business, you have to be thinking about the repeatability at a very early stage,” said Hogsett during the discussion. “It’s easy for a domain expert like me to get trapped into consultancy, which isn’t bad. It’s just not how you get to scale.”

Hogsett’s company, HurriLab, prepares hurricane risk analytics and data based on hurricane forecast models for companies and stakeholders preparing for a storm. The company is in its early stages.

Swann, whose company creates 4D map data to help optimize coastal intervention strategies, recently closed its pre-seed funding round at $945,000, and Swann emphasized collaboration as one solution for building coastal resilience. 

“Our goal is to open up data access and intelligence for communities to be able to learn from what works,” she said. “If Smart Sea Walls work, if Sandbar Oyster Company works best, those communities around the globe can see that and can utilize that, so that we can become more resilient together.”

Dan Blackburn, the director of information technology at N.C. Ports; Ulku Clark, professor of cybersecurity and information systems at UNCW; and Adam Berthold, co-founder of Deep Marine Innovations, spoke about the growing role of digital efficiency in supporting maritime operations, including the port.

The last panel of the day featured Bob Lorenz, a member of the South Atlantic Fishery Management Council's Social and Economic Panel; Conor MacNair, the CEO and founder of N. SEA Oyster Co.; and Cristi Dorry, founder and leader of C. Dorry Consulting, a seafood industry consulting firm. The panel emphasized the role of the commercial fishing and aquaculture industries, as well as regulatory uncertainty, public education and the costs associated with wild seafood.