Technological Corporation of Andalusia (CTA in its Spanish acronym) and SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS are two of the partners that form the consortium of BIOSWITCH, a new European project that officially kicked off yesterday, June 9, with an online meeting. This initiative, which counts with €1 million in funding and will last for 24 months, aims to help brand owners to switch to bio-based approaches and turn their products into bio. BIOSWITCH will focus on four value chains: agriculture, chemistry, forestry, and food, and four regions will serve as model demonstrators: Andalusia (Spain), Denmark, Finland, and Flanders (Belgium).
CTA coordinates the work package aimed at replicating the project results at the European level. The main activities are the organization of regional workshops to promote the knowledge transfer and the creation of a training program aimed at clusters, innovation agents and public administration.
“This project will allow us to continue working for the deployment of the Andalusian bioeconomy and establish ourselves as a key player in the European bioeconomy map, elaborated by the European Commision and in which CTA has recently been included”, said Gloria de la Viña, Biotechnology Technical Officer at CTA.
The main responsibilities of SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS in this project are to define and implement the communication strategy (corporate branding development, website, social media strategy, etc.), to coordinate the dissemination of BIOSWITCH, to elaborate capacity building materials, and to perform a market evaluation and prepare the exploitation plan for the tool that will be developed.
“We are very glad to participate in BIOSWITCH, a project that will allow us to further develop our services to help companies become more sustainable”, said Jesús Serrano, Deputy General Manager at Sustainable Innovations. “BIOSWITCH adds up to other initiatives related to the bioeconomy we were already part of in collaboration with CTA, like ICT-BIOCHAIN, UrBIOfuture and MPOWERBIO. Thanks to all of them, we have become a leading consultancy company in Europe with a focus on enhancing sustainability”.
A key sector to boost development
The bioeconomy is a sector of utmost importance, since it generates a turnover of 2.3 trillion euros, and it represents 8.2% of the European workforce. BIOSWITCH focuses on brand owners because they are key to boost the bioeconomy. It is the brand owners who, through their decision to use or not bio-based products, accelerate the bio-based value chains and markets. However, brand owners are often reluctant to invest in adopting a more bio approach, due to the risks and uncertainties they perceive, as well as due to the lack of an adequate support from the innovation ecosystems.
About BIOSWITCH
BIOSWITCH is an initiative funded by the Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme with a total budget of €1 million.
The project is coordinated by the Finish entity CLIC Innovation and formed by a multi-disciplinary consortium of eight partners from six different countries. The partners’ profiles include four industrial clusters: Clic Innovation, Corporación Tecnológica de Andalucía, Flanders’ FOOD and Food & Bio Cluster Denmark; two Research and Technological Organizations: Institute of Technology Tralee and VTT; and two SMEs: Biomass Technology Group and Sustainable Innovations.
