Good practice:

The Bioeconomy Science Center (BioSC), located in Jülich (Nordrhein-Westfalen)

BioSC is an ongoing concept carried out by the RWTH Aachen, the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Bonn and the Jülich Research Center aiming at developing new niches in the bio-based economy. The action priorities are decided by the stakeholders of the centre, which are large businesses linked to research institutions.
BioSC specialises on bio-based industries, with main objective to develop markets related to concrete sectors such intelligent energy, machine and plant engineering, sensor networks in agriculture of nano & micro material technologies by providing the industries with bio-based products and processes. Main services offered to members include: 1) Research competences & development projects 2) Teaching and training (workshops & graduate education programmes) and 3) Business support services.
In the centre, key areas of the federal government’s high-tech strategy and the national high-tech strategy on climate change related to bioeconomy are implemented in close cooperation with the Research and Technological Council Bioeconomy and the European technology platforms.
The BioSC offers a regional basis for existing national and international networks such as the Helmholtz Association or the Cluster for Industrial Biotechnology along with different European technology platforms, several EU projects, industrial collaborative projects and industrial projects.

BioSC employs 1200 staff members from the partner organizations. Starting with a public-private funding scheme, currently it is a 100 % public. Projects are financed by seed funds and seed funds 2.0 (12 – 24 months and between 150.000 and 350.000€) and boost funds (up to 24 months and 800.000 €).

Main BioSC projects are the FocusLabs, cooperation projects reinforced by the Seed funds 2.0 addressed in a multidisciplinary way. In the first call in 2016 three FocusLabs were funded: AP3, Bio2 and CombiCom . In the second call the FocusLabs greenRelease and HyImPAct were selected starting on 2018. In the third call Transform2Bio was selected for funding and will start on September 2019. Besides, over 40 projects have been developed by the centre under the seed and boost funds schemes.

This GP is a blueprint for developing an emerging industry in an integrated way that combines market options, research, investments, skills, education or business services, being some of these associated also to technological linkages. Besides, this overall coherent approach fosters the optimization of applied funds. Moreover, also the funding facilities, which reflect stages of the target-market development, are good inspiration to consider.
BioSC is attempting to solve problems related to the increasing world population which leads to the growing of their needs, including the demand of food or energy, being this way the main beneficiaries of this GP the society in general and the economy related sectors, in particular.
BioSC gathers and can expand already existing key competences in the field of market oriented bioeconomy research in North Rhine – Westphalia, being, therefore a flagship project with international reach susceptible to be replicated in other regions.