By connecting companies with innovators through a series of cross-border hackathons, the project is proving that real cooperation, new business models, and green transformation can start from a single challenge. Speaking with several project partners, we explore how this approach is building capacity, trust and new opportunities for sustainable growth across Europe’s bioeconomy regions.

Like many regions across Europe, rural and peripheral regions across the Baltic Sea are rich in biomass and the potential for a thriving bioeconomy, but infrastructure and investment are often more thinly spread. This makes the shift to circular business models more challenging for many biobased industries, particularly small producers.

BioBoosters set out to close that gap with a very practical approach to innovation: company-driven hackathons run by a cross-border network that connects challenge providers with solution providers, surrounds them with mentors, and pushes promising ideas towards real cooperation, pilots, and, ultimately, new business.

A different approach
“We have nine regions around the Baltic Sea, all with smart specialisation strategies focused on a competitive and sustainable bioeconomy,” says Anna Aalto of Jamk University of Applied Sciences, the project’s lead. “But as rural regions, we struggle with lesser innovation capacity. There just aren’t that many actors locally, so we need to connect better. The hackathon is our method to bring the right mix of industry, academia, research and NGOs around a specific company challenge.”

The project has addressed 18 challenges facing the companies to date and from this work Aalto sees three recurring needs: valorising side streams from agriculture and forestry; using digitalisation and new technologies to boost both sustainability and competitiveness; and replacing non-renewable inputs with bio-based alternatives while creating higher-value chains.

On the ground, the barriers to meeting these needs are concrete. “Resources are dispersed and often seasonal,” notes Svea Uusen of Pärnu County Development Centre. “It’s difficult for small producers to cooperate even when their side streams are similar. Processes may run only a short time, which can make them financially unfeasible.” For many, she says, the pivotal question is a business one: “They need to understand what model they can implement. Often, despite good ideas, the investment is too big.”

There is also the issue of capacity. “Once you start valorising side streams, that becomes a new business,” Uusen adds. “Micro-companies don’t have the capacity to take that on. They prefer that someone else turns those streams into their core business, and that’s where BioBoosters’ network and trust-building matter.”

Company challenges and open calls

The BioBoosters model begins upstream of the hackathon event. “We work with the challenge provider company to define the need, to understand what solution they want, how they’ll evaluate ideas, and what impacts matter to them,” says Aalto. An open call then promises that the hackathon’s winning team will be able to start cooperation with the company that issued the challenge. This could be a business opportunity, a research collaboration or even a pilot.

Anyone can apply, but of those who have “around 70% are companies and 30% research teams,” Aalto explains. A typical hackathon has about six teams who sign NDAs to protect IPR. After a kick-off with the challenge provider, teams work for several weeks with mentors from industry, research and business development to refine the technical proposition, the route to market and the pitch. Day one of the hackathon is deep mentoring and networking and day two is pitching to the company jury. “There’s an official winner,” Aalto says, “but we often see multiple cooperations start, between challenge providers and non-winners, between teams themselves, or between teams and mentors.”

Since its launch, BioBoosters has built an impressive record of results. Eighteen business-driven hackathons have already taken place across the participating regions, each validating the model through real company challenges and tangible outcomes. In total, these events have generated around 120 potential solutions to circular transition challenges, with 246 teams from over 20 countries applying to participate. The hackathons have sparked 23 new RDI and business collaborations – 13 of them international – while connecting more than 500 specialists in the process. Through its growing community of over 1,800 professionals on LinkedIn, BioBoosters has become a central meeting point for innovators across the Baltic Sea Region’s circular bioeconomy.

The results show how the model itself is working. Nearly all surveyed participants reported clear benefits: 98 per cent of challenge provider company respondents said they received a promising solution to their challenge, while 95 per cent of solution providers gained new know-how from mentoring and 94 per cent agreed that the BioBoosters hackathon format is an effective way to build partnerships for idea testing and commercialisation. More than just an event, each hackathon has proven to be an impactful, fast-paced collaboration and learning experience – one that translates creative ideas into viable pathways for the circular bioeconomy, while demonstrating a method that can be transferred to innovation hubs across Europe looking to support their own green and digital transitions.

Local circular loops

Impact takes different forms and it takes time. “If the hackathon was last year, the winner cooperations might still be in progress,” Aalto says. “That’s normal.”

In Germany, Gudrun Mernitz of WITENO GmbH describes a former sugar factory of Cosun Beet at Anklam on the road to become a green biorefinery: “They came with six side streams and selected three winners from their hackathon event – a Belgian start-up and two German university groups. One research team found internal funding; another is being directly funded by the company for piloting. With the start-up, we’re working towards European-level funding. There’s even a plan for a pilot plant on the production site, likely operated by the start-up. It’s a new business, directly connected to the challenge provider.”

In Lithuania, Lina Stanionytė of Sunrise Tech Park, which coordinates the Cleantech Lithuania cluster, highlights two soil-mission challenges. Nando, a biotechnology company, sought to reduce over-fertilisation and improve soil quality. A student team won with AI-based drone field mapping and monitoring which aligned well with Nando’s drone operations. The full implementation of the solution needs investment, but the students gained equipment access, ran field trials, and opened career opportunities.

For Toksika, a state-owned hazardous-waste management company, the challenge was bioremediation of petroleum-contaminated soils without chemicals or ecosystem damage. “Two cooperations emerged,” Stanionytė says – one with a German company offering a market-ready solution now being trialled in Lithuania, and another with a Polish bioprocess laboratory preparing test at Toksika’s sites.

Sometimes the best solution is just around the corner. In Poland, Damian Kuznowicz of Foundation of Education and Social Dialogue “PRO CIVIS” recounts the case of Targi Kielce, one of the biggest trade fair centres in Central Europe : “After each trade fair they threw away single-use carpets, about 300 containers a year and they wanted a more sustainable solution to stop this waste. The winner was a company just one kilometre away that recycles textiles into construction materials, already at scale, making benches, tables and even decking for sailing piers. The hackathon connected an obvious opportunity nobody had realised.” A Finnish-Estonian team with a similar idea later secured about €30 million to build a textile-waste factory, another sign the market is moving.

Business modelling

BioBoosters’ ensures both challenge and solution providers work within a commercial reality. “The challenge provider is the proxy end user and also a mentor,” says Kuznowicz. “Teams meet a diverse mentors with expertise on technical, marketing and business development, who probe what matches and what doesn’t from a user perspective.”

That structure translates well to Horizon-style programmes. “Hackathons are powerful for the multi-actor approach, engaging industry, researchers, start-ups and users to co-develop outputs,” he continues. “They’re also strong community-building tools: two intensive days together creates relationships that last through the project and beyond.”

Uusen adds a caution and a remedy: industrial symbiosis in rural settings “doesn’t emerge quickly. You need active facilitators to map value chains, broker trust and keep momentum. Strengthening those regional multipliers is part of the method and part of the legacy.”

From regional valleys to Baltic Sea Strategy
At policy level, Katrin Kepp of the Estonian University of Life Sciences sees growing alignment: “EU-level funds and regulations flow down into national innovation support systems. For rural needs, instruments like Regional Innovation Valleys and Horizon Europe are coming through. As a result, universities are taking action to build knowledge-transfer units and even new departments focused on open innovation across the public and private sectors. Interest in this kind of activity is clearly growing.”

For the macro-regional picture, Aalto stresses a fit with the EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region—Policy Area Innovation (challenge-driven, international co-creation) and Policy Area Bioeconomy (sustainable, competitive circularity). “Starting from company needs makes S3 cooperation relevant for businesses,” she says. “It’s a practical way to connect industry to inter-regional smart specialisation.

“All 18 hackathons have been successful as processes,” Aalto notes. The crunch comes after the event: aligning funding and operational steps to start cooperation. That’s why the partners are focusing on post-hackathon support – signposting instruments, integrating hackathons into project work plans (e.g., Horizon, CBE JU), and, where possible, offering the model as a service that companies can purchase directly. Several partners are already running hackathons under separate funding to road-test continuity beyond the core project.

Transferability and scale

The model is modular by design. “We will use it to help build an innovation centre in Hungary,” says Kepp. “You can run the full, step-by-step process or pick individual modules. We’ve attracted BIOEAST countries with this approach to boost open innovation, and success is expanding through our networks.” That transferability, together with clear roles in multi-actor projects, positions the method for wider adoption.

For Aalto, the biggest legacy is the network itself and she believes the project has capacitated the partnership to launch many new initiatives. The method has proven flexible and adaptable to target-group needs, delivering value to challenge providers, solution providers, mentors and the organisers.

And the BioBoosters’ partners want to keep going, through services, regional projects, and EU proposals. They are packaging the know-how they have developed with a Hackathon Handbook for organisers and communicators and an insights publication on relevance, efficiency, impact and sustainability is also in production. Finally, the project will produce impact reviews of case stories.

The measure of success, however, will be clearly visible in the pilots scaled to plants, and the new circular businesses anchored in rural places that emerge from BioBoosters’ open innovation events. BioBoosters is proving that by connecting the right people around real company needs, rural bioeconomy regions can rapidly expand.