Evaluating Innovations in the Ornamental Fish Industry

Abstract The ornamental fish industry has a number of characteristics that must be taken into account when suggesting a method for evaluating innovations at the farm level. A small model discus, Symphysodon aequifasciata, farm (high-value, low-volume egg-layers) served as the case study for this article. Innovations target such technological parameters as annual reproduction per pair, egg fertility, larval survival, and growth. The methods employed in this study involved the following steps: (a) building an operational model; (b) parameterization of the domain of all possible production plans, based on an innovation index c; (c) tabulation of an objective function fτ; (d) analysis of unit-free measures of economic response to innovations-point and arc elasticities of approximated fτ and identification of innovation stages by their response to increase in c. Numerical modeling (steps a, b, c) showed that improvement of larval survival allows an increase in net present value, which is several times larger t...