Opening new doors to new bio-businesses and their novel products and processes

Innovative products and processes are key to bioenterprise and the creation of successful bio-based businesses and economies. To create new and improved market-ready products, genuinely novel technologies and business advances are usually very necessary. These are exciting and rewarding – but also complex, exacting, expensive and risky, requiring new, often radically new, ways of scientific and business thinking and working by both individuals and companies with collective ambition, imagination, determination and conducive working environments. In this article, ways that could help emerging bioenterprises succeed are discussed, including how to work more innovatively and combine economic success with contributing ‘people’ and ‘planet’ benefits. How NamZ, now called WhatIF Foods, an emerging bio-business, began, started work and developed its first products is described, giving insights into its strategies, the multiple different challenges faced, the various advances necessary to overcome them and the range of skills required. WhatIF’s approach is to identify unmet needs, unsolved problems and under-researched opportunities – and then to devise, invent and develop a stream of new products to meet and solve these, together with processes to make them, in ways that benefit people (such as farming communities) and that are not just sustainable but can actually reverse environmental and related problems. Then WhatIF develops markets for them – right through to new product launches by partner or subsidiary companies each specializing in manufacturing, marketing, distributing, and selling specific products.