Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Forest Bioeconomy Technology’ is part of a Foresight initiative that leverages data from technology companies and other key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
Canada is the world’s second-largest forest products exporter. The forestry sector is a large contributor to Canada’s real GDP and has historically been a crucial economic driver for many regions across the country.
As demand for traditional forest products such as lumber, pulp, and paper has changed, so too has Canada’s forest product industry. Mill closures and industry consolidation have affected several forestry hubs across the country and driven industry to find ways to capture additional value from forest biomass and utilize forestry residues to create value-added products.
Innovation in this sector represents a renewed opportunity for economic growth through the proliferation of engineered wood products, biofuels, biochemicals, biomaterials, and more. From cellulose nanocrystals to mass timber, biochar, renewable fuels, and drone technology, there are a wide range of products being commercialized by Canadian innovators. Canada’s forest bioeconomy has a strong foundation to capture this growing market opportunity in the coming years.
Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Forest Bioeconomy is part of a Foresight initiative leveraging data from technology companies and other key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
These insights will support our understanding of the landscape of technology innovation in Canada’s forest bioeconomy while painting the whole picture of the value chain in order to grow its market share and environmental impact.
This report is available for download. Submit this form for access.
Forest Bioeconomy Technology: The Value Chain
The value chain describes the journey of raw forest biomass inputs through a number of processing steps and the ways in which they connect to inputs, outputs, and endpoints such as users, markets, or the environment.
Canada’s Forest Bioeconomy Companies
141 companies were assigned to Canada’s forest bioeconomy value chain.
Forest bioeconomy companies found in this exercise are highly concentrated in Canada’s four largest provinces. The forestry bioeconomy is unique compared to other value chains Foresight has mapped, in that a relatively higher proportion of companies are at the material/product level rather than processing. Most companies leverage forestry by-products and mill residues to create new value-added products.
Our data and analysis indicates and discusses provincial trends and clustering, areas of competitive strength, and potential opportunities for growth. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Canada has a strong opportunity to become a global leader in utilizing forest biomass to mitigate GHG emissions of other sectors including agriculture, the built environment, and transportation.
- Bioprocessing is an area of opportunity for Canada to better extract added value from wood harvesting.
- Biofuel & biogas processing is an area of strength for Alberta and British Columbia.
- Engineered wood products companies are concentrated in British Columbia and Québec.
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Why?
Foresight’s venture acceleration programming emphasizes the importance of understanding your value chain.
Knowing where a company fits along the value chain, which companies or technologies come before or after, who the competitors are, and where trends are happening geographically is critical information for ventures, industry, and investors to understand.
This information is also highly important for governments to identify areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities in the innovation landscape, pinpoint areas for targeted support and where targeted R&D and project funding will deliver the greatest return on investment for Canada’s communities and environment.
The Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Forest Bioeconomy database and analysis report are invaluable tools intended to provide the Helix-5™ ecosystem unique insights into the landscape of Canadian forest bioeconomy technologies.
Interested in learning more about Canada’s forest bioeconomy value chain? Fill out the below form below to download the report.
