Transition Dynamics in the Nascent Bioproducts Industry

Bioproducts are chemicals derived from a biomass feedstock that can be produced on their own or as biofuel co-products. Historically, bioproduct developers have faced significant barriers in scaling up bioproduct technologies and in bringing bioproducts to market, resulting in a high failure rate for bioproduct development projects. To date, there has been essentially no research done on the factors that lead to a bioproduct successfully capturing market share and why bioproduct projects fail. We address this knowledge gap with a model of the transition dynamics involved in taking a bioproduct technology from applied research to commercial production and the interactions between bioproduct developers, investors providing private funds, and federal government agencies which may provide cost-sharing and production incentives. This model incorporates several novel techniques including stochastic submodels and forecasts of market shares and company performance. Our research objectives are to identify relevant factors and mechanisms that impact bioproduct success and to develop a decision support tool, the Bioproduct Transition Dynamics (BTD) system dynamics model, that can be used by investors, bioproduct developers and government agencies to bring more bioproducts to market and to grow the nascent bioproducts industry.