Biomaterials and technologies are at the forefront of managing structural change to biobased industries in Europe. The Biobased Products are also one of the six Leading Markets in Europe. A sustainable growth of the biobased industry requires integrating and demonstrating cooperation between stakeholders over different disciplines and value chains, with specific emphasis on SMEs.

The problem we are addressing by this presentation is that the existing EU strategies and national policies are poorly communicated to the actual end-users – to the companies (being SMEs or innovation teams in enterprizes). They are developed without user feedback and have poor user experience. This is in sharp contrast with companies and teams being the ‘active principle’ of innovation and value generation.

Our Innovation ePlatform organizes the existing information visually as driving forces of the business model environment, focusing on the user’s specific segment of the value-chain. The central element of the GUI is the product that the user selected. The supply and market components of the value-chain, as well as the business environment are displayed according to the users’ industry and product – and selected from a categorized database of relevant information. Usage analytics and user feedback can be used for automatic enhancements of the individual UX.

In case the user is a cluster or policy maker, the ePlatform visualizes the entire value-chain network in the chosen industry – allowing for identification of sectorial cross-overs (e.g. biomaterials used in automotive industry are applied also in packaging), gaps, and can be upgraded to visualize flows of material, products, people, and value. Geographical visualization enables the identification of regional smart specialization hot-spots.

The ePlatform is intended to be used as an innovation tool for companies, especially to better identify technical challenges, business models, and to support the development of technical, economic, policy and market conditions.

The main strength of the ePlatform is its value-chain-centric architecture and its up-to-date relational database of relevant information.