Abstract
This study aims to present a holistic image of the strategic development needs and potential solutions within the Finnish non-timber forest product (NTFP) business sector and demonstrate a new hybrid methodology for collaborative strategy formulation. The perceived challenges and solutions were collected with the 635 group-working method in a nationwide series of NTFP actor workshops. The analysis applied the Strategic Option Development and Analysis (SODA) approach and the formal network analysis. Business actors emphasised two complex and interrelated aims of development at the core of the business activity: (1) to improve the profitability of the NTFP business and (2) to facilitate the growth of the sector. The present bottleneck is perceived in the raw material acquisition and productising, and many wider development themes, such as business logic and sustainability, received little attention.
Highlights
The commercial potential of non-timber forest products (NTFPs) has received increasing interest throughout the world, in the developing and emerging economies, where NTFPs are an important means to alleviate poverty and address conservation concerns [1] NTFPs are recognised as an integral part of multifunctional sustainable forest management [2,3] and promoted in various international and national policy agendas [4,5])
We identified four head constructs and 137 tail constructs from the causal map of 448 constructs and 706 links
The four head constructs depict the ultimate aims of NTFP sector developments, which are: (A) to improve the profitability of the sector/business, (B) to facilitate the growth of the sector, (C) to respond to climate change and (D) to activate rural villages (Figure 2)
Summary
Development and innovation efforts are increasing, and far, there are some studies on, inter alia, the volumes and economic values of forest resources [6,7], the economic potential of NTFPs for forest owners [3], the development of yield models and their uses in multi-objective forest management [8,9,10] and factors affecting the market supply of NTFPs [11]. Attention has been paid to NTFP-related entrepreneurship, value chains and markets [12,13,14]. The research focus has obviously been on raw material harvesting and acquisition, whereas many aspects of the NTFP business, such as sustainability, are still insufficiently known [15]. Despite the increasing research efforts, the business potential of NTFPs is still strongly underutilised.
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