The project certainly bears a potential impact at economic (creation of new businesses and support to innovation), environmental (favouring circular economy) and social (new jobs and more specialised workforce) level. The experience collected throughout the project proved that research in the bioeconomy sector is very lively, and single initiatives are numerous.
However, a number of consideration have to be made besides the project in itself.
In its last year, ENABLING suffered from the spread of the COVID pandemic, which strongly disadvantaged the uptake of innovations in biobased products. Economic and social crisis triggered by the pandemic caused significant losses to innumerous economic actors, including bioeconomy stakeholders. Interest in innovative solutions and in new sectors therefore came to a stake, as companies had to switch on a “survival mode”. In this context, impact on economic growth and on the creation of jobs remains limited. However, COVID has only halted an increased attention on bioeconomy, with major changes in policy due to a new Agriculture Policy and Green Deal. It is not feasible to demonstrate a direct cause and effect relationship between the project and the growth of the bioeconomy, as this growth has also been influenced by so many other policy, projects and funding mechanisms of orders of magnitude much larger than the ENABLING project. However, ENABLING has certainly acted in line with such policies and took important steps in a sector which remains to a large extent unstructured. Such key results are in particular: i) an extremely detailed activity of biomass characterisation and industrial processes has been performed, which results have been made available online; ii) the collection of a great number of practices across Europe which have been put online and are therefore easily accessible to any bioeconomy actor; iii) a business support system which has been useful to understand main interests and concerns by practitioners; iv) an online biomass trade platform as a virtual meeting place to favour a match among bioeconomy actors. All these results do contribute to make the bioeconomy tissue more cohesive and connected.
Lessons learned from the implementation of the project, and possible policy recommendations mainly refer to how projects such ENABLING should be structured. Firstly, it is critical to network all the projects working on the bioeconomy, as individual projects can add substantial value by working together on dissemination as well as technical issues. Second of all, networks take much time to set up and consolidate and 3 years is probably too short for them to become self sustaining. Moreover, some longer term functions, such as support to companies, will have to be implemented on a continous base, also after the project completion. Finally, considering the major changes ENABLING went through, it is important that projects remain flexible and change direction along with the economic, social and political context.
