Collaboration Is Supposed to Help Produce More Bioeconomy Innovations
Replacing fossil-based materials with bio-based alternatives requires innovation on a scale that no single firm or sector can deliver alone. Forestry and agriculture firms hold the raw-material expertise, but they concentrate on established, low-margin products. Downstream manufacturers understand the markets where substitution must happen, but they lack biomass processing capabilities. Bridging this gap is widely seen as a precondition for the bioeconomy transition.
Policymakers and industry experts have converged on a prescription: more collaboration. However, this consensus rests on surprisingly thin evidence. Whether collaboration actually drives bioeconomy innovation—and through which mechanisms—has remained largely untested. Policies designed to promote collaboration are, in effect, built on assumption rather than evidence.
We Analyzed Real, Significant Swedish Innovations to Test This
We drew on the SWINNO database, which tracks fifty years of commercialized innovations in Sweden (1970–2021). A collaboration, in our data, is any case where two or more firms jointly commercialized an innovation. From these collaborations we constructed a network connecting every pair of firms that co-innovated.
We then tested four mechanisms through which collaboration might drive innovation. Direct ties capture the effect of working with a partner. Indirect ties measure whether a firm benefits from its partners’ connections. Brokerage positions identify firms that sit between otherwise unconnected groups. Cognitive proximity—how much overlap exists between two firms’ innovation portfolios—tests whether knowledge similarity helps or hinders the innovation that collaboration produces.
For the full methodology and statistical results, see the paper linked below.
Explore the Network
The network below represents all technology collaborations between Swedish firms that resulted in a commercialized innovation between 1970 and 2021.
Node color indicates the share of each firm’s innovations belonging to the forest-based bioeconomy (dark = high bioeconomy share, light = low)
Node size corresponds to the firm’s total number of commercialized innovations
Edge color indicates whether the collaboration produced a bioeconomy innovation (green) or not (gray)
Click on any node to see details about the firm’s innovation activity.
We Found that Bioeconomy Innovators Produce More Innovations when They Collaborated, but Not More than Other Firms
More Collaborators, More Innovation
Each additional direct collaboration partner meaningfully increased a firm’s predicted innovation output. A firm going from zero to just one collaborator saw a notable jump in predicted yearly innovations. This relationship held equally for bioeconomy and non-bioeconomy firms—both benefited from collaboration in the same way.
The connections of a firm’s collaborators—its indirect ties—showed no clear effect on innovation output. The predicted innovation counts remained essentially flat regardless of how many indirect connections a firm had. Direct collaboration, not passive network position, appears to be what matters.
Knowledge Similarity Has a Sweet Spot, but It Barely Matters
Cognitive proximity followed the theoretically predicted inverted-U pattern: some similarity helps, but too much stifles innovation. However, the practical effect was modest. Bioeconomy firms sat below the optimum, not above it—contradicting fears that bioeconomy actors are locked into overly similar knowledge. The quantity of collaboration matters more than the type of knowledge accessed through it.
Firms that connected otherwise disconnected groups—occupying so-called brokerage positions—showed no clear relationship between this position and innovation output.
What This Means for Policy
More collaboration means more innovation. Policies should prioritize increasing the quantity of collaborations rather than trying to optimize their composition, if they want to increase the amount of bioeconomy innovations. Lowering barriers to collaboration—through funding schemes, matchmaking platforms, or simplified joint-venture regulations—is likely to yield greater and more certain returns than attempting to identify ideal partners in advance.
These policies need not be tailored exclusively to the bioeconomy. Bioeconomy and non-bioeconomy firms follow the same collaboration-innovation mechanisms. Broad innovation policy that makes it easier for firms to work together benefits the bioeconomy just as much as sector-specific programs would.
The network, however, reveals a more targeted opportunity. A large number of firms have never collaborated at all. For these isolated actors, the first collaboration represents the biggest step change in access to external knowledge and partners. Efforts aimed at first-time collaborators are likely to yield the highest marginal returns.
@online{kreutzer2026,
author = {Kreutzer, Philipp Jonas and Taalbi, Josef},
title = {Collaboration for the {Bioeconomy}},
date = {2026-03-24},
langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kreutzer, Philipp Jonas, and Josef Taalbi. 2026. “Collaboration
for the Bioeconomy.” March 24, 2026.
