Added-value innovation of forest biomass supply chains

Abstract

The aim of this work was to study how process innovation can be applied in forest biomass supply chains for reducing costs to add value compared to traditional supply chains. The work consisted of four articles using alternative data and a variety of methods. The process innovation of forest biomass supply chains contains several possibilities. There is a need to identify which processes should be renewed incrementally or completely. The main innovation types determined by the case articles were divided into incremental, radical and network innovation. Achieving cost reduction was possible by innovating traditional forest biomass supply chain processes in a novel way in all cases. The case of network innovation however, presenting the co-operation of an entire supply chain with stakeholders by linking forest management and logistics business systems together in process innovation, provided the highest cost reduction, which can be seen as added value. This is because network innovation includes several structural holes with close connections between processes and systems that offer the possibility of finding more cost reduction potential for the entire supply chain. The main conclusion of this work is that it is not worth implementing innovation solely inside a company ́s own activities, but opening the innovation process for the whole network of a supply chain is crucial. The methods presented in this work could be mainly applied in forest biomass supply chain innovation. The work enhanced the knowledge of innovation usage for forest biomass supply chains.