Somewhere between adolescence and maturity, a line is crossed, yet no one hands you a diploma, rings a bell, or hosts a party — we know the moment has arrived because, one morning, everybody has stopped applauding your pilot plant and started asking whether you can deliver 10,000 tonnes on Tuesday. You’re a Big Boy […]
Making Farmers Whole — or Making Another Hole for Farmers to Fall Into? Down around Braddyville, on the south side of Page County, Iowa, the cornfields roll toward the Nodaway River and the Missouri line. For a hundred years, farmers here have been getting extraordinarily good at one thing. Growing corn. The seed got better. […]
In 813, Charlemagne was near the end of his life, and the old Roman world was near the end of its rope. The emperor represented a restored Roman order. But restoration on the map was not the same as protection on the ground. When Saracen raiders struck Centumcellae—the ancient Italian port that became Civitavecchia—this was […]
As is my way, while the sensible sunbathers of late August are enjoying the final golden days of summer along the Calabrian coast, I am perched high on a cliff above the Tyrrhenian Sea, squinting out into the blinding western sun and imagining the Battle of Lipari, fought just across these very waters in 260 […]
In Part 1, we followed six discoveries that changed the way we think about project failure. Failure proved to be a trajectory, not a condition. Problems interacted. Viable futures could be preserved. Sequence mattered. Those observations could be represented within a formal mathematical framework. And, perhaps most surprisingly, fewer than 5 percent of the failed […]
For years, we have watched promising bioeconomy projects disappear. Some had celebrated technologies. Some had strong management teams, blue-chip partners, government support, attractive markets and hundreds of millions of dollars of announced investment. Many had favorable techno-economic analyses. Many had technologies judged sufficiently mature to proceed. And yet they failed. Others, facing apparently formidable obstacles, […]
Today, The Daily Digest is releasing The Digest’s 100 Hottest Projects in the Bioeconomy— 2026 Edition, our annual benchmark profiling and ranking the world’s leading commercial-scale bioeconomy assets. This year’s rankings focuses on execution—curating benchmark facilities that have achieved Final Investment Decisions (FID), financial close, or construction milestones across 2025–2026. Spanning more than 15 countries across North […]
In Florida, The Daily Digest announced the Bioeconomy 500 for 2026, recognizing 500 individuals whose leadership is helping transform the bioeconomy from scientific and commercial possibility into projects, products and industries. The honorees span the full architecture of the advanced bioeconomy: scientists and engineers, entrepreneurs and executives, project developers and operators, financiers, policy leaders, feedstock […]
In Florida, the Daily Digest announced the 50 Hottest Companies in the Bioeconomy for 2026, as voted by the Digest’s readers and invited selectors. For the first time, EVERY took the #1 slot in the annual poll. Avantium takes the #2 position, followed by LanzaTech at #3, Strategic Biofuels at #4 and Itaconix at #5. […]
This week, Again announced the acquisition of Genomatica, uniting Again’s cutting-edge biomanufacturing scale-up capabilities with Geno’s world-class AI discovery and design platform. So, Rome bought Greece. That is one way to think about Again’s acquisition of Genomatica, announced this week, bringing together one of industrial biotechnology’s most ambitious new scale-up companies with one of its […]
