Strengthening the role of the bioeconomy in sustainability through innovation, circularity, engineering constrains and strategic governance

Bioeconomy can make a decisive contribution to the sustainability of agriculture, fisheries, and forestry, if it is guided by clear principles: prioritizing food and feed security, safeguarding ecosystem integrity, promoting the cascading use of biomass, and ensuring the equitable distribution of value. Nevertheless, the transition towards a circular bioeconomy requires the large-scale industrial deployment of transformative, resource-efficient technologies for biomass conversion, separation, and process integration. This paper examines why the circular bioeconomy has become central to sustainable production and consumption, what role deep-tech innovation plays in accelerating its uptake, which trends will shape the sector towards 2040, and how the “valley of death” can be narrowed through circular communication and skills development. The study combines PRISMA-guided literature selection, keyword co-occurrence mapping, comparative policy assessment and an engineering and technology assessment, integrated through a systems-level synthesis organized around one organizing hypothesis, five research questions and six defining relations. The study is an evidence-informed conceptual synthesis, not a validated model, and its outcome is five propositions for future empirical testing. The transition is treated as an explicitly non-linear process exhibiting path dependence, threshold behavior and multiplicative failure: in an illustrative, uncalibrated gate model of commercialization, raising the pass probability at four successive gates from 0.6 to 0.8 raises the deployment probability from 0.13 to 0.41. Within the fourteen-record corpus, the co-occurrence network comprises 121 keywords, 111 of which form a single connected component, sustainable development showing the highest total strength (93); and European Investment Bank activity of EUR 7.1 billion per year covers approximately 6% of the estimated EUR 121.8 billion annual investment gap of the EU bioeconomy. The results are directly applicable to policy makers, practitioners, academia and entrepreneurs.