As part of the M26 consortium meeting on 14 October in Istanbul, Türkiye, the exploitation coordinators Roel (VITO) and Tatjana (CLIB) had prepared an exploitation workshop for all project partners. Prior to the workshop, partners had identified their key exploitable results, and sketched first plans on how to exploit these. In the workshop, this analysis went deeper, using a lean canvas model and a SWOT analysis.
To get everyone’s brain cells active and creative at the beginning of the workshop, Roel presented a series of stimulating statements to the partners:
- You can make everything out of lignin, except money
- There is no green premium
- We need incentives for bio-based content (regulation)
- We don’t need IP to valorise our results
- We only need drop-in molecules for COUNTLESS applications
- Our market share will not grow with successful exploitation of our results
- Bio-based carbon is more important than recycled carbon
- There is no societal impact of our KER
Partners responded by moving to the yes or no side of the room. Short follow-up discussions clarified their respective opinions and gave food for thought.
Interestingly enough, partners were in agreement that both recycled, and bio-based carbon will be necessary to provide the carbon needs for a circular bioeconomy in the future. Although they are all focussing on bio-based aromatics in the project, clearly, they have a big picture view as well.
Another point of agreement was that the statement “You can make everything out of lignin, except money” is patently untrue. Maybe not surprising, for a project aiming at the cost-effective production of lignin platform chemicals.
In the lean canvas, all partners focused on one of their KERs, and identified key fields for its exploitation. For the consortium, it was relevant to a) understand the other partners’ aims beyond the project and to b) identify potentials for even closer collaboration, potential problems and cost constraints.
The following SWOT analyses emphasised these findings. All partners left the workshop with a deeper understanding of each other’s motivations and common challenges.