Understanding Business Environments and Success Factors for Emerging Bioeconomy Enterprises through a Comprehensive Analytical Framework

Muluken Elias Adamseged,Philipp Grundmann

doi:10.3390/su12219018

Muluken Elias Adamseged, Philipp Grundmann

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219018

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Abstract

The development toward the bioeconomy requires, among others, generating and institutionalizing knowledge that contributes to technical and nontechnical inventions and innovations. Efforts to support innovation are often linked with the development of business models that facilitate the development in bioeconomy. However, the interdependences between the business models and their business environments are not sufficiently well understood in a way where misalignments that can obstruct the development can be dealt with adequately. Given this lacuna, this research aims to contribute to the development of a comprehensive analytical framework for better understanding the conditions of business environment as well as empirically apply the framework in an empirical study on cases of bioeconomy enterprises in Europe. In this paper, a comprehensive business environment framework is developed and applied for analyzing over 80 cases, thereby allowing for critical action arenas and crucial success factors to be identified. The findings are derived from a systematic application of the framework to relevant action arenas for business development: institutional development, technology and knowledge, consumers’ agency, market structure, funding, resource and infrastructure, and training and education. The results show that businesses in the bioeconomy, unlike other businesses, have to deal with more and very specific constraining legislative issues, infant and non-adapted technology and knowledge, as well as unclear values and perceptions of consumers. Due to this, businesses have to develop new forms of cooperation with different stakeholders. Successful businesses are characterized by the fact that they develop specific strategies, steering structures, and processes with a particular focus on learning and innovation to overcome misalignments between the business environment and their business models. Focusing efforts on learning and innovation in institutional development, technology and knowledge, consumers’ agency, and funding are especially promising as these turned out to be particularly critical and in particular need of institutional alignment for reducing different kinds of transaction costs in the development of bioeconomy.

Highlights

The literature on bioeconomy devotes much attention to the technological aspects of new biobased products as well as policy measures that support a shift towards a sustainable bioeconomy [1,2,3,4]
The analyzed bioeconomy enterprises are subject to a wide range of rules and regulations, from registering the business as a legal entity to complying with various regulations and standards in order to ensure certain conditions, such as human and environmental safety of products that are offered on the market
The capacity requirements for dealing with sometimes complex regulations are high for bioeconomy enterprises that engage in the provision of several and innovative products and services, e.g., in a circular value chain

Summary

Introduction

The literature on bioeconomy devotes much attention to the technological aspects of new biobased products as well as policy measures that support a shift towards a sustainable bioeconomy [1,2,3,4]. Existing definitions of the term bioeconomy are neither completely congruent nor offer scope for interpretation [5,6] Against this background, we adopt a broad definition for building an objective, comprehensive and value-neutral framework. A growing number of studies aim at evaluating business models in the bioeconomy, but the majority of these studies are review studies without additional contributions to the conceptual and empirical body of literature about the enterprises in the bioeconomy. The focus of these studies is to contribute to the definitions [15] and understanding of value propositions [16], business model design [9], and challenges and opportunities to operationalize [13,17] business models for the bioeconomy

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