From Niches to Global Value Chains: The Role of Firms' Collaborative Strategies in the Bioeconomy

ABSTRACT The bioeconomy is expected to carry out the transition towards a bio‐based economy thanks to the transformation of petrochemical and fossil fuel value chains. Nevertheless, bio‐based innovations fail to overcome the hurdle of commercialisation and appropriation. This paper offers a renewed understanding of this problem by combining the niche‐to‐regime transition literature with the global value chain literature. The article hypothesises that to overcome the challenge of commercialisation and appropriation, bio‐based innovations need to break out of their sociotechnical niches and integrate global value chains (GVCs). To achieve this, niche players and lead firms in GVCs need to collaborate together. Using the case of microalgae, we theorise a time‐sensitive typology of collaborations according to the three phases mapped around innovation development from emergence to diffusion and commercialisation. This study highlights that the type of collaboration to adopt depends on the level of development of an innovation, suggesting that the study of collaborations as diffusion and commercial strategy deserves further attention in transition studies and GVCs literature.