The forest sector is expected to play a leading role in the transition towards a green economy.
Today the wood is being used in many ways, from beauty products, gels for back pain, hip replacement material, and spacecraft to active sustainable wooden buildings. Such extensive use brought the wood into centre of the many innovative processes, creating the new products and markets.

On 22 April InnovaWood organised a seminar entitled “Innovation in the Forest-Based Sector – Prerequisite for the Green Economy” in collaboration with UNECE/FAO. The seminar, which took place at the UN in Geneva, gathered together a group of experts to showcase success stories, and to exchange views on the challenges and opportunities for the forest-based sector. The morning programme on the framework conditions for innovation in the sector included keynote presentations on innovation policy, knowledge transfer and examples of good practice in Europe and Canada. In the afternoon, specific examples of innovation in the various value chains were presented. Both sessions were followed by stimulating discussions between speakers and audience. The InnovaWood seminar confirmed that innovation in the forest-based sector plays a key role for the transition of the forest-based sector towards a green bio-based economy.

“Both, process innovation and product innovation are a must for the transition of the forest sector towards a green economy”, said Ewa Ratajczak, the president of InnovaWood, stressing how new products can only come through innovative processes.

 The InnovaWood RTDI Division organized the Creativity Workshop on Societal challenges for the Forest-wood sector. The workshop took place as part of the three days General Assembly events programme. This event aimed to define potential research, development and innovation opportunities created by the grand societal challenges in Europe for the InnovaWood sector. 

 The event started with an introduction to specific topics concerning the social challenges provided by key note speakers. The introduction was followed by a brainstorm session between the participants. This brainstorm workshop was organised in a way that the discussions start from the specific challenges and not from the sector’s point of view on the future in order to have the discussion as broad as possible and not be biased by existing assumptions from the sector. By thinking out of the box, new challenging opportunities for the future were defined and the development of strategies to tackle the forecasted challenges was initiated.