From innovation to market: what can the forest bioeconomy learn from the European Innovation Act
Europe has a world-class research and innovation ecosystem, but turning scientific excellence into successful products and services remains a challenge. This is also true in the forest bioeconomy, where bringing new forest and bio-based innovations to market often requires substantial investment in physical infrastructure and involves high technological and market risks.
As a result, many innovations struggle to cross the so-called valley of death, a phase between early-stage R&D and commercial viability, where limited public funding and high private investment risks can hinder scale-up and commercialisation.
However, this is not a challenge for the forest bioeconomy alone.
European Innovation Act
In September 2026, the European Commission adopted the European Innovation Act. The proposed Regulation aims to strengthen the Single Market for innovation by tackling two barriers to commercial success: R&D procurement and intellectual property valuation.
The Act proposes a harmonised EU framework for R&D procurement to strengthen public procurement as a driver of innovation. The framework aims to create greater legal clarity and a critical mass for investment in cutting-edge solutions, and to help new technologies reach the market faster across borders.
It also proposes an EU-wide framework for intellectual property valuation, enabling access to finance. The framework aims to support IP-backed finance and create an EU-wide marketplace for commercialising IP assets.
The European Commission identifies a broader challenge: structural barriers in the Single Market can slow down the journey from laboratory to market, from start-up to scale-up, and from invention to industrial strength. In addition, it remains overly dependent on suppliers outside the Union to buy innovative products and services.
EFI Bioregions’ work
EFI Bioregions has explored the challenges innovators face through a series of reports and activities, including events, open challenges, and workshops.
An earlier EFI Bioregions and European Investment Bank report, “Overcoming investment barriers in the forest sector: lessons learned from nine cases in Europe,” looked at the challenges that investment projects across the forest sector are facing.
It identified barriers, including complicated regulation, fragmented ownership, market failures, uncertainty and risk, limited access to finance, reduced liquidity, and low returns.
The key messages reinforce the need for an innovation ecosystem that can help promising ideas become investment-ready and commercially viable. The European Innovation Act brings this aspect to innovation finance.
In addition, the report “Scaling up forest-based innovations in Europe: overcoming the valley of death” identifies five areas where action is needed:
- Create a supportive financial framework for scale-up
- Maximise the impact of open-access scaling facilities
- Build strategic partnerships to catalyse scaling up
- Ensure coherent regulation to enable market development
- Invest in capacity building and training to create cross-sectoral profiles.
These recommendations highlight that successful scale-up requires more than funding research. Finance, infrastructure, partnerships, regulation, skills and market conditions all need to come together.
EFI Bioregions’ work on green public procurement explores how public authorities can use their purchasing power to create demand for bio-based solutions.
The report “Bringing bio-based into green public procurement: lessons from Catalonia and Zeeland” shows how public procurement can support climate goals, strengthen regional economies and reduce dependence on fossil-based inputs.
This connects with the European Innovation Act’s proposed framework for R&D procurement. It can help create the conditions for innovative solutions to be tested, adopted and brought to market.
Explore our reports
To learn more about scaling forest and bio-based innovation, overcoming investment barriers and using public procurement to support the bioeconomy, download our reports and follow EFI Bioregions on LinkedIn to stay up to date on the forest bioeconomy and what European regions are doing to move the green transition forward.
Featured image: Yaroslav Danylchenko, Canva and Regan Dsouza, Pexels