Theme 7: Stakeholder engagement and collaboration

Despite strong policy interest in the bioeconomy, connections among academia, industry, government, and society at large remain weak in someBIOEAST countries. Fragmented support systems, limited stakeholder involvement, and weak innovation platforms for co-creation considerably hinder innovation uptake.

• Bridge gaps among bioeconomy actors in science, start-ups, industry, local communities, and end users.
• Improve stakeholder enagagement in designing long-term national strategies for a sustainable bioeconomy transformation.
• Integrate local underrepresented communities such as smallholders and niche producers, in decision-making and benefit-sharing processes in bioeconomy initiatives.
• Improve transfer of science-based knowledge and innovation into practical solutions and policymaking.
• Effectively support early-stage innovative start-ups tailored to bioeconomy and rural needs.

We are looking for ideas, concepts or prototypes at different stages of development, close-to-market or market-ready solutions, to address –but not limited to– the following areas:

• Collaborative digital platforms and networks to:
  • Enable knowledge transfer, co-creation and multi-stakeholder engagement.
  • Crowdsource opinions and solutions from various actors, especially smallholders and youth to facilitate their policy involvement.
  • Enable deliberation, idea rating, feedback collection, and geotagging of inputs, facilitating real-time stakeholder consultations.
  • Improve interoperability between science and policy.
• Solutions supporting innovation uptake including:
  • Regional innovation accelerators well suited to supporting the bioeconomy.
  • Business support models adapted to small start-ups’ and rural innovators’ needs.
  • Open innovation platforms tailored to the needs of rural areas.
• Training tools and capacity building programmes for:
  • Strengthening bioeconomy innovation ecosystems and upscaling innovative solutions.
  • Multistakeholder interdisciplinary collaboration.
  • Supporting entrepreneurship among students and young professionals.