Chiefly comprised of European and North American companies, the natural products industry mostly sources natural products from plants, algae and fish. Plants and algae are either collected from the wild in rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America or purposefully grown. The active ingredients are then extracted and isolated as standardized extracts in dedicated plants based in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, USA and Canada and then sold to a number of different industries for their pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, cosmetic and health applications.

For comparison, in 2009 the industry, including the key sub-sectors of food and beverages, cosmetics, herbal medicines and pharmaceuticals, had $65 billion revenues.²⁶

Studying the literature on technology and innovation management in bioeconomy companies and building on a previous study of Golembiewski and co-workers,²¹ van Lancker and co-workers in 2016 identified five main factors driving the innovation process in the bioeconomy (Table 1), suggesting that an open innovation approach naturally fits the bioeconomy.²⁷

Table 1 . Five main factors and requiriments affecting the implementation and management of innovation development processes in bioeconomy companies according to van Lancker et al. (Adapted from Ref.27, with kind permission)