Philipp Jonas Kreutzer

The bioeconomy promises to replace fossil resources with renewable biomass, assigning forests a central role in sustainability transitions. This dissertation tests that promise against the empirical record, using SWINNO, a database of significant commercialized innovations in Sweden linked to firm-register data, to trace fifty years (1970–2021) of forest-related innovation output. Four papers investigate the rate and character of bioeconomy innovation, the role of collaboration networks, the relationship between bioeconomy visions and innovation direction, and the structural dynamics that constrain forest-based innovation.

First, after 1990, Swedish forestry firms diversified into biofuels, bio-based materials, and other fossil-replacing products, but this product-expansion period was driven by incumbent pulp and paper companies drawing on established competences rather than by new entrants. The bioeconomy extends established competences within a mature industry, turning the previous recipient of external innovations into producers of new products. This discontinuity represents a new life cycle. Second, bioeconomy innovations were consistently less complex and, after 1990, less likely to have received public funding than other Swedish innovations. Collaboration became relevant only during the product-expansion period and conferred no special advantage on bioeconomy firms. Third, the dominant bioeconomy vision consolidated existing technological trajectories rather than guiding new ones: innovations aligned with it peaked during the 1970s energy crises, decades before the vision entered policy discourse.

These patterns are explained by what the thesis conceptualizes as subordinating coupling––a mode of inter-system interaction in which capital-intensive downstream infrastructure constrains the upstream resource system. Each new bio-based product stream reinforces demand for homogeneous cellulose feedstock, tightening instead of loosening the grip of industrial monoculture forestry. Through multinational investment, this production model replicates globally, converting diverse landscapes into uniform fiber plantations. The bioeconomy, as observed in fifty years of innovation, extends rather than transforms the production logic of industrial forestry.