D2.1 Catalogues of technologies, business models and social innovations for small-scale biobased solutions.

MainstreamBIO is a HORIZON Coordination and Support Actions project funded by the European Union under grant agreement 101059420. It started in September 2022 and will have a duration of 36 months. The project aims to co-develop innovation support services and digital tools to build awareness, understanding and capacity to uptake small-scale bio-based solutions in line with market demand and regional specificities. As part of the project activities related to the development of the MainstreamBIO digital toolkit, the present report presents the input for the MainstreamBIO online catalogue of small-scale bio-based technologies, business models and social innovations to offer “hands-on” business and technical support accounting for economic, social and environmental dimensions across all development stages of a project comprising small-scale bio-based solutions.
Small-scale biobased technologies are often the central part of a new business model of a local biobased solution. A business model is a conceptual framework that describes how a company creates, delivers, and captures value. It is the plan that a company uses to generate revenue and make a profit. A business model can be seen as the overall strategy that guides a company's operations and decision-making processes. Social Innovation provides an effective approach towards achieving societal behavioral changes and promoting sustainability. Social innovation is a participatory process that involves various stakeholders and can be applied to tackle global and local issues, including environmental challenges and their impacts on people's lives, health, and wellbeing. Ultimately, SI contributes to the development of sustainable solutions to pressing social needs.
In an early stage it was decided to have three separate catalogues namely on technologies, business models and social innovations for small-scale biobased solutions, instead of one fully integrated catalogue. All the information that was collected through the literature search and interviews was processed in catalogue information templates (see Annex B - Annex D). Besides general literature sources MainstreamBIO also specifically looked at recent European projects like Power4Bio, BE-Rural and Bio4Africa.
In total 16 small-scale biobased technologies in the bioeconomy sector were described. By examining the small-scale technology list, stakeholders can obtain a basic understanding of the key aspects of potentially suitable technology solutions for their specific case. The final selection of 34 business models shows a good picture of the availability of alternatives in the EU. Most of the available feedstocks in the EU are represented along the catalogue, so the replicability and transferability can be ensured except for obvious limitations as climate or access to feedstock. The 19 examples in the social innovations catalogue aim to address social and environmental challenges while also creating economic opportunities. By examining these examples, insights can be gained into the ways in which social innovation is being used to drive positive change in this field.
A matching table has been constructed that standardizes the description/names of the following categories: feedstock, technology, and product. This matching table can be used to connect the three catalogues and it will can be implemented in the digital toolkit. The information in the three catalogues will be input for ‘Development of a methodology for matching available biomass and waste streams with market and technology information (multi-criteria decision making model)’ (Task 2.4) and ‘Development, upgrade and integration of digital tools in the MainstreamBIO digital toolkit’