Gediminas is a visionary and entrepreneur thrilled about helping start-ups and spinoffs in deep-tech industries who are striving for impactful solutions. He is an investor, inventor, and teacher of synergies and cooperation. Today, he is working on a global goal and uniting world-leading innovators, and engineering enthusiasts who are striving to deploy or develop Negative Emission Technologies.

Collaboration between biotech companies and farmers

Gediminas stated that biotech companies should collaborate more with farmers, on engaging and exchanging. He suggested the creation of associations among stakeholders. His other idea was to set up internships for farmers to go to work for biotech companies. In this way, they would better understand clients’ needs and the market.
When asked about examples where coordination of collaboration could be improved, Gediminas pointed to cooperatives for farmers and biotech companies organised in regional clusters as well as to blue clusters.

Barriers to good collaboration

When asked about the barriers to good collaboration, Gediminas pointed to secrecy and competition between companies. Not sharing is often harming companies as it means they grow very slowly. Gediminas highlighted that the blue bioeconomy is currently in growing capacity for the next 10 years at least, so there is no need to compete. As another barrier, he highlighted the unequal treatment of the government in some sectors: food sectors and biotech sectors are well lobbied, but not sea farmers.

Improving infrastructure

When discussing what activities should be intensified to overcome existing barriers, Gediminas proposed small-scaling refineries to help farmers refine their products themselves locally and build and maintain their low-medium value products. This would create opportunities to make a small shop and increase the value of products. Moreover, Gediminas believes the biotech industry should offer tools (e.g. infrastructure, pilots) to support entrepreneurs in starting a new farm business and creating the material the biotech companies need.

Financing of bioeconomy ecosystem

When asked about what in the financing of the bioeconomy ecosystem could be improved, Gediminas mentioned the EU programs. He explained there is too much reporting. In his view, also the speed is very important. Sole industrial leading projects providing financing are faster than public funding projects. In the former, there are no publications and results are produced faster, e.g. in a maximum of 6 months.

Another issue discussed with Gediminas was related to funding. In his perspective, we need to help farmers find funding and develop proposals. He explained that they do not know often how to apply. Also, he believes we should help farmers with the administration of projects. Farmers do not have the capacity for fund-raising.

Overcoming barriers related to funding

Gediminas suggested we automate and standardise administration in public funding projects and minimise project reporting.