Services in the forest-based bioeconomy – analysis of European strategies

ABSTRACT

The increasing role of services for business making has been recognised in the forest-based sector, yet a systematic analysis of this emerging phenomenon is lacking. The current study derives from service research three perspectives for analysis: services activities separate from primary production and manufacturing–processing, services outputs separate from tangible products, and service as strategic, that is, business model consideration how value is created. Document analyses have been carried out to examine how these perspectives are identifiable in the European-level bioeconomy and forest-based sector strategies, as well as in a number of major strategic partnerships beyond the bio-based industries, that is, the research and innovation programmes of processing industries, manufacturing, energy-efficient buildings and green vehicles. The upstream and downstream strategies tend to differ on their approach to services. This paper contributes to the forest sector research by introducing two distinct perspectives from the service research literature to address the increasing role of services in the context of evolving bioeconomy: (1) explicating the role of services in the bioeconomy supply chains in order to improve efficiency and existing processes and (2) elaborating service as a means to better understand the changing business models and modes of value creation which may lead to system-level changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Services
• forest-based sector
• bioeconomy
• service research
• foresight

Acknowledgements

The corresponding author acknowledges the support of the Doctoral School of the University of Eastern Finland for this research. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the feedback from the two Anonymous Referees which helped to develop and finalise the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.