Today, essential commodities are manufactured from chemicals based on oil or extracted from plants. This way of manufacturing depletes natural resources, increases carbon dioxide emissions, and negatively affects biogeochemical cycles. Products should instead be obtained using sustainable biotechnological processes – and that is what the Sustainable Innovation Office at the Novo Nordisk Centre for Biosustainability (DTU Biosustain) at the Technical University of Denmark helps ensure.

The Office has two missions:

1) Inspire, foster, and support innovation at DTU Biosustain and the surrounding Danish bioeconomy.

2) Drive, guide, and develop technologies and impact by assessing economic, commercial, and sustainable criteria.

The Sustainable Innovation Office guides innovation by quantifying, and potentially reducing the broader set of impacts of bio-based technologies. It is a multidisciplinary unit, responsible for assessing innovations in improving the current state of production, while simultaneously enhancing the financial, socio-economic, and environmental performance inherent to the products.

We collaborate with incubators, business developers, individual customers, and industrial and academic organizations. We attract, discover, assess, and evaluate potentially innovative outputs of candidate translational projects and ideas for their commercial potential and their technical quality.

We provide the following services:

• Environmental impact assessment: Both LCAs and specific exploration of defining characterization factors for standalone environmental indicators
• Socio-economic impact assessment and social life cycle assessment: expertise in quantifying social KPIs
• Generating future scenarios of a bio-based industry landscape with an aim to predict competitiveness and impact of disruption by a biosolutions value chain