Exogenous and endogenous drivers of bioeconomy and science diplomacy

Bioeconomy advanced rapidly worldwide as a concept and as an important element of transformative economic strategies. This mini-review asks, what were the exogenous and the endogenous drivers? Bioeconomy is exogenously driven by recent advances in basic science facilitating bio-product innovations, and by the increasingly recognized need to address the ecological problems of the Anthropocene. Bioeconomy is endogenously driven for instance by established evidence of opportunities in bioeconomy that leads to investments, by strategic science policy getting proactively engaged, and by scale and network effects. For these endogenous drivers, people do matter, in particular visionary policy makers, corporate investors, scientists, and strategists. Christian Patermann played a key role among these.