Take-homes from European Project P2P finBIO's third workshop in Lille, France

25 February 2022

The European Project P2P finBIO ran its third workshop on 18 March 2022 in the city of Lille, France where partners met to share and exchange knowledge and best practices for bringing value to our members and stakeholders with a special focus on the right mix between public and private funding for startups and SME’s.

Innovation manager Heidi Høy Dyrholm (left), Food & Bio Cluster Denmark participated and here are some of the take-homes from the workshop.

Points from workshop

• Being a startup within the bioeconomy differs from other industries, especially from tech or SaaS, as time to scale up is typically longer.
• Startups tend to be attracted to cluster organizations as they look for money but stay for the network and development opportunities.
• Skipping important pilot-steps as a startup in the bioeconomy can be fatal
• The use of public funding for testing & piloting provides a blue-stamp for private investments – some even require this
• VCs and BAs are attracted to the clusters for access to cutting edge innovative startups and ideas
• The social aspect is extremely important, also to overcome barriers for discussing sensitive issues – why not invite all members out for 24 hours of work and fun as B4C does?
• We don’t deal with confidentiality / openness the same way – Dutch use “Chatham House Rule” (everything you say stays within the room), French have a NDA clause in the membership contract. In our next meeting, we will discuss cultural aspects – perhaps there is an explanation there?

Overall, the main objective of these meetings is to share successful methodologies and identifying the regional financing ecosystems of agri-food and bioeconomy sector in the 5 countries of the consortium.

The meeting was organised by Bioeconomy For Change (B4C), the French bioeconomy cluster, with more than 500 members from across the entire bio-based value chain, from upstream agricultural inputs to the marketing of finished product.

The project has already conducted two workshops on Denmark and Spain. The next will be held in Portugal at the end of April.

About the project

P2P finBIO is coordinated by Food & Bio Cluster Denmark and made up of four other European organisations which work closely with the agri-food and bioeconomy sectors. The five partners are part of the national innovation ecosystem in their respective regions, and offer services related to innovation management, business modelling, internationalisation and facilitating access to funding.

The partners are:

• Food & Bio Cluster Denmark (Denmark)
• Foodvalley (The Netherlands)
• Bioeconomy For Change (France)
• Association BLC3 - Technology and Innovation Campus (Portugal)
• Technological Corporation of Andalusia (Spain)

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 967555.

For more information

Heidi Høy Dyrholm

Innovation Manager

T  8999 2511
M 6011 0363
hhd@foodbiocluster.dk
LinkedIn

Back