IB2Market aims to bring industrial biotechnology from the research lab to the market and to solve the bottle-necks in industrialization. The project covers process development, scale up, market exploration and the drafting of a valorization plan to support a successful market introduction.

Specifically, the project targets the development, scale-up, market exploration and market introduction of new industrial biotechnology processes that have recently been developed to produce the following compounds:

• BIOSURFACTANTS, tension-active ingredients with a wide range of applications. More specific, the project targets bola-sophorolipids, a completely new type of biosurfactant.
• SPECIALTY CARBOHYDRATES, mainly for pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications. IB2Market targets L-fucose and fucosylated oligosaccharides that are difficult to produce through extraction or chemical synthesis.

In addition, the project aims at validating a new concept of open innovation to reach market exploitation of new-to-market molecules by gathering relevant players active at each level of the innovation chain. This is referred to as the IB2Market model of open innovation towards commercial exploitation, or briefly ‘IB2Market exploitation approach’.

For both product lines, the fermentation process and downstream processing will be optimised and scaled up to 15.000 litre scale. Sufficient amounts of product will be produced for application testing and exploratory marketing, in order to identify the most interesting market segments. The technical, economic and environmental sustainability of the process from biomass to product application will also be assessed, with particular emphasis on identifying and solving the bottlenecks in the innovation chain. A valorization plan will be drafted to complete all the steps of the innovation chain. The project will result in the industrialization and commercialization of the developed products and processes.