Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BIOPEN (BIOPEN)

Teaser

Nowadays, the center of the bio-based economy is the development of integrated value chains removing sector barriers, where market and product innovations are driven by societal needs and vision of brand owners, and require the collaborations between different sectors through...

Summary

Nowadays, the center of the bio-based economy is the development of integrated value chains removing sector barriers, where market and product innovations are driven by societal needs and vision of brand owners, and require the collaborations between different sectors through new bio-based value chains (from feedstock to products), also establishing co-operations throughout industry clusters.

Open innovation has been identified as the major driver to perform innovation through the flow (in and out) of knowledge, technologies and competences, for organisations to design, plan, and implement market and product innovations as well as to establish sustainable partnerships joining forces with customers, feedstock suppliers, academia, and financial sector.

BIOPEN ambition is to become a single voice for the bio-based industries in Europe, gathering expertise and promoting engagement and involvement of industry, researchers and academia at European and national level, by setting up an Openinnovation platform addressing strategic cross-cutting challenges such as:

- clustering and networking to develop new value chains and favour the emergence of co-innovation partnerships across the value chains;

- Stakeholders engagement and support with regards to setting-up at least 20 co-innovation partnerships alongside existing and new value chains;

- creation of a knowledge centre collecting the prospective and insight of the community, and providing access to relevant information for markets and products innovations in the bio-based ecosystem.

Work performed

\"The BiOPEN Open-innovation Platform is online and accessible at the following link: https://www.biopen-project.eu/. The public section of the platform acts as the official project website to ensure that interested stakeholders have access to information about the project. The private sections of the platform are accessible only by registered users, and they are designed to offer a view on all the contents (Technology Offers, Technology Needs, and Project Opportunities) shared by the BiOPEN community on the platform, as well as to enable the users to propose new contents. The private platform presents also the “Advanced Tools” section that offer the possibility to search over millions of documents (Patents, Technical papers, and Funded Projects, etc.) and over a subset of such contents qualified by the BiOPEN community for the bio-based sector. The widget has been developed to be embedded in clusters’ websites.

A BioBased Ecosystem was developed to define the structure, contents and links between different elements, i.e. stakeholders, activities, feedstocks and products of the bio-based value chains. Perspective Studies were developed including findings related to 5 different value chains of the bio-based industry, replying to critical questions related to the economic perspective, technical maturity, advancements and market outlook. The studies are available on the platform, in rooms (virtual spaces in which users can share relevant documents and information) where these can be downloaded together with relevant references used in the perspective studies. The 5 perspective studies deal with:
1 – Coatings and packaging materials
2 – Functional polymer and oligomer bio-based products
3 – Products and applications based on lignocellulosic feedstock from wood
4 – Bio-aromatics for synthetic materials, chemicals and coatings
5 – Algae and seaweed-based products

In the first 18 months of the project, 4 Brokerage events and 3 workshops have been organised, with more than 300 attendees. The Workshops are aimed to gather input from the community that is needed for the different tasks of BiOPEN. Brokerage events have the objectives to create networking opportunities in view of fostering cross-sector and cross-national collaborations and generating co-innovation projects.
Thanks to the Open Innovation platform and 7 the events organised, BiOPEN partners analysed and mapped \"\"needs\"\" and \"\"haves\"\" of 115 organizations of the Bio-based sector, set-up the 22 co-innovation partnerships and more than 100,000 registered users are accessing the platform.

More than 100 dissemination and communication actions were carried out by the project partners. An audience of about 107,048 people (coming from scientific community, industry, civil society, general public, policy makers, media, investors, customers and others) was reached through dissemination and communication actions.
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Final results

BiOPEN:
• by setting-up of the BiOPEN Open-innovation platform, is enabling collaborations and the sharing of knowledge, as well as the engagement of professionals and scientific experts around bio-based products development and downstream applications.
• established a knowledge and Innovation Centre, in fact the BiOPEN platform allows its community to access a large amount of information relevant for the bio-based sector
• undertook a series of 5 perspective studies on major applications sectors of the bio-economy.
• thanks to a structured set of activities BiOPEN is favouring the emergency of new partnerships in the bio-based sector (workshops, brokerage events, project ideas analysis and matchmaking with stakeholders and funding opportunities), 22 co-innovation partnerships already arose thanks to the services offered by BiOPEN partners.
• will ensure that the Open Innovation platform continues beyond the lifespan of the project thanks to the sustainability plan defining the specific actions that will be undertaken to keep the BiOPEN services alive.

BiOPEN\'s final target is to unleash the potential of the bio-based industry in Europe. The BiOPEN unique network, stimulating innovation within existing and new value chains, has the ambition to create a novel framework of services based on the Open Innovation approach that will carry on beyond the 30 months of the funded project.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.biopen-project.eu/.