Managing Bioplastics Business Innovation in Start Up Phase

Abstract

Fostering innovation in a mature company can often seem like a swim upstream-the needs of the existing business often overwhelm attempts to create something new. Mature companies understand that to compete today they need to innovate. But finding sources of innovation while still paying attention to the current business can be a struggle. Open innovation has played an important role to drive the new business in 21th century. Academic research commercialization may be challenged by the faculty members' academic routines, institutional priorities, and faculty retention. In order to undertake applied research, university scientists must spend a certain amount of time each period to keep up with the latest scientific developments and absorb new ideas. Because almost all faculty members have teaching responsibilities, many of them fear that participation in the protection and commercialization of Intellectual Property Rights is time consuming.There are lots of basic researches focuses on polylactic acid (PLA), the most promising bioplastics, however that is still far behind the commercialization step. The close innovation system may take longer time to achieve excellence in its technology under fierce competition environment. This study illuminates the complexities and challenges involved in managing innovation toward specific results. These challenges seem to result, in part, from the multidisciplinary nature of R&D work, it associated with risks, uncertainty and non-linear processes. One of the finding in this study is that many of the factors that drive innovative bioplastic industry are derived in collaboration with technology push and demand pull. The study's findings contribute to our understanding of consumer attitudes towards 'Green' products such as bioplastics. Most critical in this respect is whether such products make economic sense for a company. This study may provide some guidelines to support development of a concrete directionfor PLA under open innovation atmosphere.

Supply Chain Management Practices as a Support to Innovation in SMEs

“…Moreover, SMEs have difficulties in raising finance to invest in information technologies (Damaskopoulos and Evgeniou, Resuming the theoretical discussion presented above, it is assumed that collaborative practices in the supply chain contribute to innovation in products and processes, which is generated by the combination of technical know-how between suppliers and clients (Whitley, 2002). As Theinsathid, Chandrachai and Keeratipibul (2009) verified in their study, many of the factors that drive innovation are derived in collaboration with technology push and demand pull. Based on these discussions and considering that collaboration among the agents provides a set of SCM practices (Bayraktar et al, 2009;Bayraktar et al, 2010;Kim, 2006;Bhutta, Rana and Asad, 2007), the following hypotheses are presented:…”

Control of end‐of‐life oxygen‐containing groups accumulation in biopolyesters through introduction of crosslinked polysaccharide particles

“…[ 1,2 ] Although replacing of fossil‐based polymers by biopolymers may have positive impacts on the environment and human health, the production of biopolymers at large industrial scale and their end‐of‐life management are still challenging. [ 1,3–5 ]…”

“…[1,2] Although replacing of fossil-based polymers by biopolymers may have positive impacts on the environment and human health, the production of biopolymers at large industrial scale and their end-of-life management are still challenging. [1,[3][4][5] Polylactic acid (PLA) is one of the most attractive biopolymers because of its compostability, biodegradability and properties that make it a good candidate in replacing fossil-based polyolefins for some industrial applications. [1,2,[6][7][8][9] Therefore, the PLA shows inferior thermal and thermomechanical resistance with respect to synthetic polyolefins and to improve PLA poor properties, natural clay, metal oxides, natural fibers, cellulose, and so forth, have been evaluated as suitable additives.…”

Advancing bioplastic packaging products through co-innovation: A conceptual framework for supplier-customer collaboration

“…Currently, the turnover of bioplastics is limited to only around 1% of the global plastic circulation (European Bioplastics, 2018) and problems in the application often exist between the packaging manufacturer and the product manufacturer. The packaging manufacturer processes the bioplastics raw material into packaging (Benetto et al, 2015;Sossa et al, 2015), but particular desired functions or performance is lacking, and its quality is lower compared to the conventional fossil-based packaging (Khan et al, 2016;Theinsathid, Chandrachai, & Keeratipibul, 2009); thus it is not fit for use for the product manufacturer's products. For example, certain bioplastic packaging has a low barrier to air or water vapour (Benetto et al, 2015), so when used for food and fresh produce, the contents easily lose moisture from evaporation, becoming dry and causing a shorter product shelf life (Khan et al, 2016).…”