The meeting was held in Strasbourg from March 7–8 and was organized by France’s Industry and Agro-resource cluster.
“We are very pleased to see so many interest in this event format, bringing together experts from the academic institutes with companies and service providers to discussions at eye level,” Yvon le Henaff, Chairman of the French Bioeconomy Cluster IAR, tells European Biotechnology Magazine.
IAR represents about 370 stakeholders in the GrandEst region of France, which is home to several demonstration plants.
Topics included technology optimization challenges, processes that fully valorize all biomass fractions, and how digitization can help advance the industry. “Digitalization helps to parallelize different parties involved so that time savings between 30 up to 60 percent are achieved,” Ivan Stjepanovic of Siemens said during his presentation. The company has developed an Internet of Things ecosystem that could lower costs of setting up and running industrial facilities.
A roundtable on synthetic biological also discussed the potential of strain engineering to develop new industrial enzymes in shorter periods of time.