The objective of BIOSWITCH was to boost the growth of bioeconomy in Europe by encouraging and supporting brand owners to switch to bio-based approaches. Brand owners are key stakeholders to implement the bio-based economy at EU, national, regional, and local level. However, brand owners can be hesitant to invest to bio-based solutions due to perceived risks and uncertainties. BIOSWITCH supported the bio-based transition in two complementary approaches: 1) concentrating on brand owners and their needs and, 2) developing tailored tools to give brand owners themselves tools to build their value chains, to learn and to communicate their bio-based approaches and to prove the impacts of their switching efforts by evaluating the environmental, economic and social effects of their transition case. The project activities supported the transition towards sustainable circular bioeconomy by promoting bioeconomy, bio-based solutions and generation of new value chains, and helped to create jobs and wellbeing for the society by realising the European Bioeconomy Strategy.
BIOSWITCH developed a systemic framework of brand owners, consumers, public administration, and bio-based industry to encourage, facilitate and accelerate brand owners from different sectors and at different stages of the transition journey to switch-to-bio-based approaches. BIOSWITCH's holistic, systemic approach was built on two pillars:
1) A framework where brand owners were placed as the centre of the public administration-bio-based industry-consumers triangle through a set of events and communication actions that allowed shaping solutions to mitigate their perceived risks.
2) The BIOSWITCH toolbox as the ultimate instrument that assisted them in the bio-based transition journey.
The specific objectives of BIOSWITCH were:
1) Develop a network of brand owners and to identify best practices and assess main needs, perceived risks, motivation and incentives they gain when switching to bio-based approaches.
2) Deliver an effective “switch-to-bio-based toolbox”, the so called BIOSWITCH toolbox.
3) Validate the proposed BIOSWITCH toolbox with real brand owners from different sectors and maturity levels, evaluating their feedback and producing the final configuration of the toolbox.
4) Roll-out the BIOSWITCH toolbox at European level and replicate it at regional level.
5) Disseminate and exploit BIOSWITCH.
Overall, we have directly reached over 1500 participants through the different project events and activities within the 2-year project lifetime. Altogether, BIOSWITCH has produced 31 deliverables and reached 9 milestones during the whole project lifetime.
