**5. Conclusions**

The survey results showed that the scientists involved in the Bioeconomy Research Program Baden-Württemberg agreed with and orient themselves toward the official bioeconomy strategies. The strategies have thus met the objective of becoming an important guiding tool for research activities. The guidance provided by the strategies could lead to a narrowing of technology options and implementation pathways. Then again, the o fficial bioeconomy strategies could be seen as important catalysts for the development of alternatives, which has been part of a critical discussion in the last years. This interplay between closing and opening pathways for implementation of the bioeconomy demands further investigation. On the one hand, the emergence of alternative bioeconomy approaches, the establishment of actor networks supporting these alternatives, and their influence on policy-making require further scientific investigation. On the other hand, o fficial bioeconomy strategies should include reflexive elements, opportunities for new technical ideas, and space for nontechnical ideas and social innovations. In this way, bioeconomy policies could contribute to the development of enhancements and alternatives to existing approaches rather than deal with critical appraisals from the outside.

Our results showed that the surveyed scientists tend to consider the di fferent implementation pathways for the bioeconomy to be combinable, while in the scientific and societal debates, these are seen as contradictory. In conclusion, it can be stated that the majority of respondents support combining alternative and well-established practices and ideas. More research is needed to better understand how realistic such combinations are in practice. The next step after analyzing competing narratives would be to translate them into scenarios and to examine their preconditions and impacts.

Anyway, a critical reflection of goals and implementation pathways, taking into account societal expectations, is of crucial importance in any update process of bioeconomy strategies. Aspects that are not considered at this stage will most probably not be included in the following research funding. The involvement of civil society is still in its infancy and needs to be further developed. The drafting of new or the revision of existing bioeconomy strategies should be set up as a participatory process that includes a broad spectrum of stakeholders and viewpoints.

The development of the bioeconomy as a comprehensive sociotechnical transformation requires interdisciplinary but also transdisciplinary research approaches. The Baden-Württemberg Bioeconomy Research Program, with its interdisciplinary orientation, largely meets this requirement. Consequently, the results of the survey partly reflected these specific research conditions. For instance, the respondents' understanding of the bioeconomy was closely linked to sustainability issues. In addition, they described several challenges for the future development of the three biomass value chains, emphasizing that sustainability is not easy to achieve and that research needs to be intensified in this field. The analysis of collaborations revealed that exchange within scientific communities prevails. Cooperation with industry, other business actors, and end-users is relatively weak, but is commonly called upon as needing to be intensified. However, it remains open how well stronger cooperation with potential users of new bioeconomy technologies for accelerated adoption goes together with intensified examination of sustainability issues. This tension, e.g., between establishing new bio-based processes and reflections on the limits of biomass utilization, should be deliberated on in collaboration. Furthermore, a framework for an integrated assessment of socially responsible research [37] should be introduced in the bioeconomy research area.

**Supplementary Materials:** Supplement S1: Questionnaire, available online at: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/ 11/15/4253/s1.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization and methodology, C.P. and R.M.; survey execution and analysis, C.P.; writing—original draft preparation, C.P. and R.M.; writing—review and editing, C.P. and R.M.; visualization, C.P. and R.M.; project administration, R.M.; funding acquisition, C.P. and R.M..

**Funding:** This research was supported by the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg within the framework of the Bioeconomy Research Program Baden-Württemberg and is based on the project "Bioeconomy in Baden-Württemberg", gran<sup>t</sup> number 33-7533-10-5/145/1.

**Acknowledgments:** We thank our retired colleague Juliane Jörissen for developing and conducting the survey with us and all of the scientists involved in the Bioeconomy Research Program Baden-Württemberg who filled out the questionnaire. We acknowledge support from the KIT-Publication Fund of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
