Abstract
Innovations are a key component of the forest bioeconomy. Many types of innovations are needed for an efficient forest bioeconomy to be deployed. This article aimed to analyze the scientific literature on the topic of innovations in the forest bioeconomy, to understand where we are and where we are likely to be in the future, considering technologies, business models, etc. First, the scientific literature, in the form of peer-reviewed articles indexed in the Web of Science, was compiled in a comprehensive dataset, on which we analyzed the most important authors, their affiliations, regions they come from, journals where papers were most commonly published, and under which categories the papers were indexed. The total number of papers matching the keywords was 161. We found that the number of papers published on the topic is increasing and that, on average, each paper was cited 18 times. A total of 504 authors dealt with the topic, presenting a rather small community. This finding was reinforced by the outcomes of the analysis of regions where the authors of the papers were affiliated—Europe being the region to which most papers were affiliated. We conducted a qualitative synthesis of the literature on forest bioeconomy innovations. We found that authors dealt with the necessary adaptation of policies, while innovations were mainly focused on biorefining, biotechnology, production of various biomaterials, as well as innovations of business models and stakeholder interactions.
Highlights
We aim to identify the main clusters of researchers dealing with innovations needed for the deployment of an effective forest bioeconomy, where they are located and what the trends are in publication numbers
Our analysis showed that innovations in the forest bioeconomy are gaining traction in the scientific community, and the community of researchers connected to forestry and forest-based industries is beginning to adopt the terminology related to the concept of the forest bioeconomy
This paper focused, first and foremost, on analyzing the state of innovations in the forest bioeconomy in scientific literature
Summary
Environmental damage has gradually become one of the common concerns worldwide, and topics such as climate change, food and energy security, resource scarcity, and industrial restructuring have been brought to the attention of governments, industries, and academic circles which are trying to avoid the increasing repercussions in nature and society [1]. New concepts were proposed which integrate economic, environmental, and social aspects of sustainable development [2], one of them is the bioeconomy. It encompasses all activities related to the production, use, and transformation of renewable biological resources (bioresources). These activities aim at sustainably meeting food needs and some of the material and energy needs of societies while preserving natural resources and ensuring good quality environmental services through innovation [4]
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