P. Circelli, Ciaotech
Published on 5 April 2018, Il Bioeconomista
An Open-innovation Platform to strengthen cooperation and joint development of bio-based industries and downstream sectors. This is BIOPEN, the European open-innovation platform that will support bioeconomy stakeholders to succeed, offering them new ways to accelerate the production of their sustainable and competitive bio-based products.
BIOPEN is an effective open-innovation platform, to favour coinnovation partnerships through matchmaking and knowledge sharing. A knowledge centre, to share information and to collect the insights of the community. It will offer a semantic search engine to perform searches over millions of patents, scientific papers, organisations, and other relevant information, which can be categorized through a bio-based sector taxonomy. Perspective studies on new bio-based products and markets (that will be ready at end of June). These will include the involvement of the value chain including downstream sectors and brand owners.
How does it work? “In an Open Innovation context – says Patrizia Circelli, coordinator of the Project and Innovation Manager at CiaoTech S.r.l. (part of PNO Group) – you can browse qualified innovation projects’ ideas where partners search is activated by leading European organisations and join projects of your interest for the production of your sustainable and competitive bio-based products. On the other way you can complete your professional profile in order to increase the visibility and to be contacted from the other members of the community to start your joint innovation project or offer your technologies in the bio-based industries and downstream sectors. In this way you will start building your global innovation, research and development network. Moreover, you can search grants for R&D in an updated database of National and European funding programs, by querying the database of grants for R&D with free keywords or specific parameters”.
Additionally, to help organizations to know more about the state of art of their innovation in the bio-based industries and downstream sectors and for benchmarking analysis, bioeconomy stakeholders can have access to millions of patent documents worldwide containing information about inventions and technical developments, millions of scientific publications aggregated from a wide range of Open Access Repositories, all European funded projects in the field.
Finally, five perspective studies on new bio-based products and markets will be available to registered users of the BIOPEN platform. The studies will be validated in four workshops hosted by bioeconomy events in Europe: The Natural Fibertastic Event in Bergen op Zoom in the Netherland on 19 April 2018; the SmartChem Summit in Turku, Finland on 22 May 2018; Chemika Expo in Poland on the 14 June 2018 and a workshop hosted by National Technical University of Athens in June.
“While respecting the highest security and privacy standards – says Circelli – the BiOPEN platform is capable to easily support matchmaking among projects and stakeholders accessing the platform itself, but also to automatically exchange information on innovation projects with several external networks (i.e. the clusters involved in the project), thus acting as a ‘network of networks’ and reaching directly a huge number of stakeholders potentially interested in co-innovation partnerships, without having to build a new community of users from scratch”.
The BIOPEN platform is developed within the BIOPEN project, a CSA project funded from the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 745719) and coordinated by Ciaotech (part of PNO Group) Italy. The consortium involves 9 partners highly specialized in the bio-based industry. It comprises five European bio-based clusters (Bioeconomy Cluster, Biobased Delta, CLIB2021, Turku Science Park, West Pomeranian Chemical Cluster Green Chemistry), three open innovation expert companies (Ciaotech, Europe Unlimited, Innovation Engineering), and one research centre (National Technical University of Athens).
