"Marine waters provide resources and services estimated at 60% of the total economic value of the biosphere. The application of cutting-edge genomic approaches has generated significant new understanding the marine environment. Rapid progress will continue given the fast rate of technological development in this field. Methods and information are sufficiently mature for direct application to achieve a more competitive European economy, and the generation of knowledge economies in the marine sector. Applications include improving the efficiency of characterisation and mining of marine diversity for biotechnology products and processes that will contribute to the welfare of mankind in a sustainable and environmentally compatible manner. Marine genomics knowledge has enormous potential to assist organisations involved in governance and sustainable management of the marine environment and its resources. However, the direct utility of marine genomics in developing commercial advantage, and in general problem solving is not understood by many decision makers in government and industry. A large amount of valuable marine genomics knowledge is inaccessible to users or exists in non-user-friendly contexts. Marine Genomics 4 Users (MG4U) responds to the specific call “Learning from research projects: specific dissemination to potential users in marine genomics” designed to address this critical bottleneck. The call was generated since it is crucial that putative end-users are aware of both the potential of genomics approaches and the state-of-the-art developments that have taken place in recent EU and other research programmes for genomics to be exploited effectively end users. MG4U brings together a project consortium containing both scientific excellence and knowledge management specialists to design an innovative and realisable project that can have a measurable impact on the current situation and become a best practice example of effective knowledge transfer."