MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Why Businesses Need to Embrace the Bioeconomy

Driven by customers, activist investors, governments, and their own values, companies are increasingly looking to make a more positive impact on the environment by adopting a sustainability focus. An important arena for those activities is the emerging bioeconomy, which focuses on using biological (nonfossil) resources, waste streams, and manufacturing byproducts, often combined with a circular, whole-life-cycle product perspective.

This movement is enabled by new materials technologies and processes that replace fossil-based ingredients with bio-based alternatives from the agriculture, forestry, and marine industries. Circularity comes in with strategies aimed at extending the useful life of products for as long as possible and then reusing their materials and components in some way.

About the Author

Donna Marshall is professor of supply chain management at University College Dublin (UCD). Aideen O’Dochartaigh is assistant professor of accounting at Dublin City University (DCU). Andrea Prothero is professor of business and society at UCD. Orlagh Reynolds is assistant professor in entrepreneurship at DCU. Enrico Secchi is assistant professor of supply chain management at UCD.

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