Abstract
The Regional Role in the Bioeconomy
Regions play a key role in supporting the growth and competitiveness of industrial biotechnology when their policies are coherently set within national and European frameworks that provide the necessary resources for their implementation. For example, by making available more than €450 billion from 2014-2020, the European structural funds—largely managed by the regions—are a major resource to achieve economic, social, and territorial cohesion as well as sustainable development and sustainable management of natural resources. These policies are also a great opportunity to support industrial innovation efforts in fostering job-rich recovery from the economic crisis, addressing global environmental challenges and climate change, and creating new opportunities for younger generations while fighting poverty and social exclusion.
In order to obtain the structural funds, each region has to define Research and Innovation Strategies for Smart Specialisation intended to focus policy support and investments on key regional priorities, challenges, and needs for knowledge-based development. They are expected to be built on each region's strengths, competitive advantages, potential for excellence, priorities, and key sectors; they now provide a clear picture of the future strategic development lines of public support to innovation, growth, and competitiveness.
The “Bioeconomy”, although not usually explicitly mentioned as such, is often found as part of these regional Strategies for Smart Specialisation. This is not surprising given its potential in tackling some of the most significant challenges of our contemporary world: the need for a more sustainable economic development model, the opportunity to foster knowledge-based industrial growth providing new and better jobs, fighting climate change, and switching from non-renewable resources to the sustainable use of renewable resources.
In addition, the regional dimension is key for the development of the bioeconomy for at least two reasons. Firstly, the close connection with local resources plays a fundamental role in the overall sustainability and competitiveness of industrial processes. Secondly, the formation of close cooperation links between different value chain players (from biomass producers to processing and the users of final outputs—including brand owners and all support services, such as logistics; finance; and research, development, and innovation) in the same area provides the necessary resources, skills, and derisking opportunities to pursue the valorization of all raw material components—again a key to the sustainability and competitiveness of the whole process. The spontaneous formation of regional clusters, a major characteristic of the current approach to the bioeconomy, is evidence of the above mentioned necessities.
At the same time, the bioeconomy poses challenges and opportunities that go far beyond regional boundaries. Large projects, many of them still involving large uncertainties and associated risk levels, call for integrated public-private resources, derisking, and access to knowledge, resources, and skills that are not necessarily available at regional level. Again, this is confirmed by what is actually going on in the market. The BIO-Innovation Growth mega-Cluster—Big-C initiative—is the cross-border Smart Specialization Initiative of the Belgian region of Flanders, the Netherlands, and the German state of North Rhine Westphalia whose aim is to transform this mega-cluster into the global leader of biobased innovation growth and a pioneer of a resource-efficient, circular economy. This cluster was already the biggest chemical cluster in Europe and one of the main players in the world. Many of the reasons making this cluster so strong were the integrated and completely linked approach. So, starting from this strength, Big-C developed a smart specialization towards biobased developments for its chemical industry and its users.
Shortly after this move, four leading bioeconomy clusters in the Netherlands, France, the UK, and Germany have joined forces as the 3BI intercluster—Brokering Bio-Based Innovation. Their goal is to support European companies to access important new markets based on renewable raw materials more successfully. 3BI is a strategic European partnership that builds on the complementary strengths of four regional innovation clusters: Biobased Delta (Southwestern Netherlands), BioEconomy (Central Germany), BioVale (Northeastern England) and IAR—Industries & Agro Resources (Grand Est, Hauts de France).
The Vanguard Initiative and its Bioeconomy Pilot
The Vanguard Initiative—New Growth Through Smart Specialisation—is driven by a political commitment made by some 30 European regions to use their Smart Specialization Strategies to boost new growth through bottom-up entrepreneurial innovation and industrial renewal in European priority areas. It has its foundations at the regional level. EU regions are the closest policy link to the bottom-up growth dynamics necessary for the renewal of our industrial fabric through their proximity to innovative partnerships and clusters. Such partnerships and clusters form ecosystems that are the catalyst for fast-growing innovative small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). Regional innovation ecosystems can and do develop solutions for significant societal challenges while delivering on the EU's ambitions for improved international competitiveness.
The Vanguard Initiative seeks to develop interregional cooperation and multi-level governance for supporting clusters and regional ecosystems to focus on smart specialization in priority areas for transforming and emerging industries through a two-way interactive process: A first, top-down phase, where regional authorities identify strategic topics (called “Pilot” in the Vanguard jargon), and, so far, advanced manufacturing, nano-enabled products, and bioeconomy have been selected; and a second, bottom-up phase, where stakeholders of different regions cooperate to identify specific topics to work on (called “Demo cases”). Table 1 shows the current demo cases under discussion within the Bioeconomy Pilot of the Vanguard Initiative.
Vanguard's Bioeconomy Demo Cases (Jan 2017)
The aim of Vanguard is to focus in particular on pilots and large-scale demonstrators where synergies between different regions are necessary to overcome the substantial size of the challenge and help the deployment of new technologies with high Technology Readiness Level (usually above 5). For example, the Lignocellulose Refinery demo case aims to construct a large refinery (1 million ton per year capacity) to supply sugars and lignin from lignocellulosic biomass to large users in the manufacturing sector for the production of chemicals and advanced biofuels. The Biobased Aromatics case intends to apply known technologies and especially innovative molecules on an unprecedented scale to make aromatics available to users to test their true potential in different applications—something made impossible by the current lack of adequate quantities of products.
Taking advantage of the complementarities in smart specialization strategies to boost world-class clusters and cluster networks, the investments taking shape within different “demo cases” will strengthen Europe's competitive capacity to lead new industries in the future and develop lead markets that offer solutions to our common challenges.
The most prominent characteristic of the Vanguard approach, and what makes it different from any other “regional network” in Europe, is the commitment of regions to use available resources—and leverage additional ones—to support interregional cooperation in large pilot and demo projects, with the potential to make the difference in opening new development opportunities for industry that is required to co-invest in the process. The active participation of industry, research and technology organizations (RTOs) and stakeholders should guarantee that available resources are allocated where market conditions, technologies, and industrial strategies are already in place. In its basic logic, this approach clearly resembles the one followed by the European Bioeconomy Joint Technology Initiative (JTI), and, not surprisingly, the Vanguard Initiative and the BIC—Biobased Industries Consortium have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to foster their cooperation.
Besides their most ambitious, and challenging, goals, the different demo cases provide a number of interesting opportunities to participants: they bring together companies and RTOs with complementary resources and common interests, facilitate the circulation of useful information and knowledge, and create opportunities for business cooperation and joint participation to European projects. Within the Advanced manufacturing pilot that started one year before the Bioeconomy one, these positive mechanisms are in full swing and have already turned their potential benefits into reality.
The Vanguard Initiative is becoming an important exemplar at European level, thanks to the high credibility and involvement of the European institutions, upstream players, and regional downstream stakeholders. It is shaping itself into a more structured organization to better support the substantial number of initiatives and projects under way. Though an innovation in itself—an “experiment” that still has many aspects to resolve in order to turn its vision into reality—the Vanguard Initiative has already established a central role on the stage of the European innovation policies.