Michigan faces an opportunity that it is uniquely positioned to seize–to build upon its established economy a new, expanded bio-based economic sector that connects the strengths of its agricultural, forestry, and natural resources sector with the strengths of its industrial and manufacturing sector to advance a new, sustainable bio-based sector that will provide them with a competitive advantage in meeting the growing market demand for renewable sources of materials, chemicals, and energy in their products, processes, and packaging.
We can do this by connecting our industries with the research and entrepreneurial activity in the basic sciences, engineering, plant science, and agriculture at our universities. Such collaboration can provide our state with a foundation for vigorous development of a new bio-based economic sector that, in its growth, will produce not only non-petroleum, plant-based products for industry, but new businesses, new jobs, and new intellectual property in Michigan.
Biotechnology has come to be associated most often with research in the life sciences and medicine, but here we are talking about using the tools of modern science–molecular biology, chemistry, engineering, genomics, genetics–to create bio-based replacements for petroleum and other fossil fuels from renewable carbon-based products, usually plants.
Bio-based materials, chemicals, and fuels could transform Michigan's economy. Michigan has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the past six years. A thriving economic future requires the building of new knowledge-based industries–and Michigan is more than well equipped to develop the new bio-based economy. This is an opportunity for Michigan's farmers as well as its auto workers.
Why Michigan State University? Michigan State is recognized worldwide as a leading research university in plant science and chemistry . MSU researchers have developed countless plant varieties to meet industrial needs. In essence, the bio-based economy represents the marrying of advanced manufacturing to advanced agriculture.
The thousands of jobs that can arise from the new bio-based economy span many sectors of the workforce, including research, agriculture, forestry, equipment and product manufacturing, education, business management, and marketing. This proposition stretches far beyond the well known potential for ethanol production, which Michigan play a role in, but for which other states are much better positioned to take the lead.
To achieve this win-win goal for workers, business, and consumers, Michigan must commit itself to developing its bioeconomy through partnerships between research, industry, labor, and state and federal government. It is imperative that university and private resources, in partnership with the 21st Century Jobs Fund, make investments in the initial stages of the industrial, agricultural, educational, research, entrepreneurial, and social infrastructure to begin delivering results quickly that will benefit the state economically and environmentally.
White paper - "Bioproducts for Economic Expansion" (PDF)*
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© 2009 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. East Lansing MI 48824
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