Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

A clear definition of terms such as the "bioeconomy" and "innovation potential" in the introduction might be helpful. Much of Sections 1 and 2 use terms and refer to regulations and policies specific to the EU, and could be clarified or generalized for a more international audience. For example, what is a "virtuous member state?" As a non-EU resident, both of these sections were hard to follow.

Related to the above, is the MCDA tool described in this article developed mainly for the EU under its specific bioeconomy framework, or could it be applied in other countries?

The main conceptual comment I have pertains to the inclusion of patents among success criteria. This criterion favors individual regions or industries from a protectionist standpoint and may indeed foster the growth of individual companies and the green economy in a specific region. However, climate change is a global challenge, and technology transfer will be critical to global implementation of green technologies, urgently needed to reduce global emissions. Looking beyond the EU it would be worth considering whether patents and regional protectionism are in the global best interest and should be weighted so highly.

Figure 1 is hard to read due to being out of focus and needs to be sharpened and possibly font size increased.

Figure 4 is captioned Overall Weights and their Standard Deviations, but I don't see standard deviations on the graph.

While the English is not bad, it would be easier to read if it were reviewed and edited by a native English speaker. In places the sentences are complex enough that they are hard to follow.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which, we hope, will meet your approval. The point-to-point response to your comments are listed below. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

As an personal opinion the conclusions can be extended and detailed.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which, we hope, will meet your approval. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper gives an interesting insight into the multicriteria assessment of bioeconomy in the context of regional development. The aim and methods are relevant, and the results and conclusions clearly presented. However, I would recommend some improvements to the discussion part, which would increase the overall quality of the paper.

Minor remarks are given below:

Line 19 – it would be advisable to explain the term MCDA for the first time in the abstract.

Lines 43-47: it is unclear whether the numbers given (eg. the share of bioeconomy in GDP) refer to the whole EU economy and which year they represent. Please clarify this.

Line 85: D’Adamo should be written with the capital letter.

Line 100: a larger reference to “present value” would be welcomed. MCA is often used as a supportive tool for Cost-Benefit Analysis (mentioned in the line 317)  in a policy or investment evaluation – a short reference to CBA and its limitations covered by MCA would be useful to fully explain the contribution of the paper.

Line 117: Is there a bioeconomy strategy on the national level in Italy? Is it the only region without bioeconomy strategy in Italy? A short mention would be useful. This could be also added to the following point “1.2 Towards a bioeconomy strategy for the Lombardy region”

Line 216: please give some additional details concerning the selection of the companies: is it the total number of companies in the bioeconomy sector in the Lombardy or some share of them and if the latter is true, what were the criteria of selection.

Lines 245-248, lines 255-256 and lines 299-300: the periods of the analyses differ from the period assumed for the turnover and employee analysis (2014-2019). Please explain shortly your assumptions in these areas (data availability, delay in reporting information, delay of impact?).

Line 289 and the following: it would be more suitable for the reader to order the points (2.1.4, 2.1.5) according to what is given in the Figure 1.

Line 549: Table 8 should be written with capital letter

Page 14: table 7 and 8 are overlapping in the printout. Some parts are not readable.

Figure 2 – I would recommend using the phrase “application” consistently in the paper to describe agrofood and the remaining areas.

Page 16, Figure 4: the title indicate that the figure contains the weights and their SD, however SD is not visible. Please adjust the figure appropriately.

 

Discussion section (page 18 and the following):

The Authors should more clearly relate the result with the economic data presented in the discussion section (eg. ROA and ROE). At this moment it is difficult to follow their intention: in what respects the economic data supports or undermine the results of the study.

It would be also welcomed to explain and discuss the reasons behind the drop in the turnover in the biofuel area (-11,71% as given in table 7, page 14).

Authors should also discuss the results in the light of similar studies. Although they explain in the beginning of the paper, that similar studies are scarce, the reference to other methods (other EU regions perhaps?) could serve the purpose of partial verification.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which, we hope, will meet your approval. The point-to-point responses to your comments are listed below and refer to the all mark-up mode visualization. Please see the attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear collegues, I am grateful for the opportunity to get acquainted with the manuscript. I consider the presented material to be very actual, timely and interesting.
Research methods have been competently selected. The proposed methodology makes it possible to reproduce the analysis processes, as well as to conduct similar studies in other regions.
The only thing I did not find information about experts who determine the weight of the selected factors for analysis. Also, in my opinion, it would be necessary to expand the number of experts to reduce the subjectivity of assessing the weight of factors: for 10 experts, the level of subjectivity of opinions can be very high. Thank you!

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Thank you for your comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Driving green investments by measuring innovation impacts. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for regional bioeconomy growth” (ID: sustainability-1390957). Those comments are all valuable and very helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have studied comments carefully and have made correction which, we hope, will meet your approval. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx