Risk management consideration in the bioeconomy

In investing in a new venture, companies aim to increase their competitiveness and generate value in scenarios where volatile markets, geopolitical instabilities, and disruptive technologies create uncertainty and risk. The biobased industry poses additional challenges as it competes in a mature, highly efficient market, dominated by petroleum‐based companies, and faces significant feedstock availability and variability constraints, limited technological data, and uncertain market conditions for newly developed products. Thus, decision‐making strategies and processes for these investment projects must consider solid risk estimation and mitigation measures. Focusing on the biobased industrial sector, this paper critically reviews state‐of‐the‐art probabilistic and deterministic methodologies for assessing financial risk; discusses how a complete risk analysis should be performed; and addresses risk management, listing major risks and possible mitigation strategies. © 2017 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd