SPRING 2021

Plants offer a lot of opportunities of valorisation. We know these, of course, as sources of food, beverages, and fodder. The medicinal use of plants exists as long as mankind. Plants may be utilised as bio-fuels and these also offer fibres of textile. The availability of advanced technologies in, extracting, purifying, and characterising plant compounds, increased the opportunities of valorisation tremendously.

The sky is the limit in valorising plants. Is it? Setting up a value chain from plant to final product is a challenge. We, therefore, recommend generating value propositions and mapping stakeholders before entering a R&D-trajectory to valorise a specific plant, or compound. It results in a concept of business model, which may be validated in a subsequent demonstration study.

We are currently exploring the valorisation of a specific plant variety. The valorisation is sought in the areas of, phytoremediation, bio-fuel, pharmacy, and agro-chemistry. We map the stakeholders in each area and make cost-benefit analyses. We will arrive at a concept of business model. The model may be of interest to investors, or not. If so, a confirming demonstration study will be the next step in the valorisation of this plant variety.

A lot of ideas of new products, or product innovations, come out of laboratories and designer studios. The ideas fit in the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of 1-3 depending on both, the work out of the idea and initial validation. The subsequent development into a prototype of the product, in general, requires high investments while the risk of product failure is relatively high. We enter the so-called valley of death. We see, subsequently, decreasing the risk of failure going from TRL 4 to 7. The product is then finalised in a process of scaling up and market introduction passing TRLs 8 and 9.

Funding of the product development in the stages of development of TRL4-7 is, in general, a challenge. It may be also for a product passing TRL 8 and 9, depending on the size of the company and the type of market. It is, for example, rather impossible for a SME to commercialise a new drug, or vaccine, without support of big pharma.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) brings up funding schemes to specifically support SMEs to develop products from TRL 5/6 to market. The EIC opened in April the call ‘EIC Accelerator Open’. The EIC adopted a strategy of very quick review while minimising the efforts of companies to submit a proposal. The good news. Success of your application, however, hinges completely on a splendid presentation of your product idea. Bad news for you? If so, we may support you to develop a high-ranking pitch desk of 10 slides, a 3-minutes video, styling the required text, and training you for an interview.