As 2021 comes to an end, our Chief Mermaid shares her reflections and roundup for the year.

Letter from Birgit // Oslo - Christmas 2021 When lockdown started in March 2020, we were only six months into the TOOL journey. I had savings secured, and while we lost all contracts within a week, we didn't have any considerable costs either. The obvious choice would probably have been just to shut down, live on savings and relax - finally having unlimited time with the kids. Instead, I scoped out five potential growth concepts - with the sole purpose of keeping two team members with busy work & income. All through my career, the most significant initiatives and exciting projects that have been born from a sudden considerable change or crisis is also an opening for rethinking and creating new solutions. And I believe that if we start by removing some of the fear factors early - such as securing income - we can utilise and liberate our capacity to work and think creatively. So that's what we did. By January this year, all five initiatives had grown into parts of the TOOL ecosystem and resources. Our team had developed, and we secured a positive 2020 result. We were building step by step through hard work and lots of dedication. But none of us would have predicted how crazy this 2nd year of lockdown would become. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair." Charles Dickens wrote it so well in the Tales of Two Cities.

2021 has been a year of extreme contrasts. It has been a year of increasing differences, where the poor and vulnerable were hit the hardest. In contrast, wealthy individuals & groups get a more significant piece of the global pie of wealth & resources. When building TOOL, my ambition is to experiment with society and system change. The aim is to connect and mobilise changemakers, democratise access to resources, and support those building a world where man and nature can co-exist and thrive in a good balance. I strongly believe in the principles of regenerative ecosystems. With an Ubuntu - or butterfly effect - focused approach, we understand our potential and responsibility to impact others and the world, which is TOOL's ethos when we go into partnerships and resource-sharing. As 2021 come to an end, we have achieved some significant steps on the way to building an inclusive ecosystem and resources for innovators and entrepreneurs to co-create across borders, segments and silos. The philosophy of TOOL is that if we are to succeed with the shifts required to deliver on the Paris agreement, we can't operate in structures made for the past. We work in open, collaborative innovation projects from the startup ecosystem to explore and experiment with how we can enable faster and better access for changemakers to find each other. And how they can benefit from global network & resource capacities in the same way that international power players do - so that we can create a level playing field. TOOL is a global community experiment for the ocean & energy industries to rethink and recreate better models needed for our shared future. Self-empowering models remove the "you lose - I win" approach of traditional customer-supplier relationships. And replace them with collaborative models, where we realise complementary strengths and how the best models for the future means that we collaborate - share risk, costs, resources - and share the future success and growth. It takes a village to raise a startup - and it takes a global one to support and mobilise those solving and accelerating solutions to the biggest pressing problems of our time. We aim to co-create this village with our partners in more than 30 countries worldwide. We have been incredibly proud to contribute to the development and launch of 1000 Ocean Startups as 1 of 2 Norwegian partners in a global coalition working to scale 1000 ocean startups through the Ocean Decade. Coalition partners include Ocean Hub Africa, Builders Vision, Investable Oceans, Swen Capital, Ocean Impact Organisation, UpLink/WEF, Sea Ahead, Schmidt Marine a.o. Our partnership with World Ocean Council will connect our innovators with their global heavyweight partner network, focused on Innovation Collaboration Network, next-generation and investors. I firmly believe that building bridges is critical to accelerating change and solutions. Hence our most strong focus this year and onwards is identifying gaps and collaborating with our partners to explore how to connect & power couple small and big players - young & seniors - and connect across industry segments and regions. This work has just started, and it will require many hands, heads and great ideas to team up. We invite all those who wish to contribute towards a fair, emission-free and waste-free future to join our global movement. Thank you for an exciting, challenging, and great year on behalf of the TOOL team - we can't wait to start 2022 with you! Warm hugs Birgit PS: Curious to learn more? Browse the TOOL Spawn platform - or reach out to us! And check out this short overview below :) TOOL Spawn - Startup's "Tinder" on the way:

We finally released version 1 of TOOL Spawn at the end of September and are currently onboarding early movers & opportunities on the world's first interactive map.

When using this map, one can find and list entrepreneurs, actors who represent resources to empower each other and drive sustainable solutions faster together.

TOOL Spawn is built on a three-party Nordic collaboration between TOOL, IndyRiot and Hedylity Technologies. Three female lead tech companies complement each other and work through lockdown to empower fellow entrepreneurs.

TOOL Aquarium - A sharing economy 365 virtual expo & event platform: Aquarium is co-developed on MyOnvent's platform - yet another entrepreneur collaboration. Built on the focus that small companies don't have the same budgets, resources and time to be everywhere.

This year we were incredibly proud to co-organise the world's biggest diversity conference for the maritime industry - Maritime SheEO by Sanjam Gupta. Both the Norwegian & Indian governments and 150+ key leaders and changemakers from maritime contributed to making this happen and gathering 3000+ industry participants from all over the world.

TOOL Box - A benefit program for blue & green innovators. We wanted to explore how to negotiate special services and deals so that smaller changemakers be recognised for their important work by getting access to better prices from high-quality providers. We have developed this as a pilot model for the Norwegian market, rolling out in January. And we are excited about the partners joining this green reward program, such as Storebrand, Monner by Sparebank 1 SR-Bank, Euronext / iBABS, Nordic Innovators, MyOnvent, Avantgarde, Berngaard, Havtal and numerous others.