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above. Data comprised of documents (e.g., relevant legal documents or information on the projects and companies) and semi-structured thematic interviews [41] with experts involved in the innovation cases. Depending on the complexity of the case studies, around one or three interviews were conducted, foremost with the innovator or entrepreneur in each innovation case and with relevant actors, such as implementing agencies of innovation or rural development support programmes. On the basis of the collected data, the local researchers produced case reports which were analyzed by the project team responsible for the innovation analysis. The research design combined deductive and inductive elements as it started from the state-of-knowledge on innovations in NWFPs and the analytical framework as described (deductive framework) but was open to discover new or specific factors and patterns from the in-depth analyses of the single cases and from the following comparative analysis (inductive elements). The inductive dimension was secured through a semi-structured interview guide that allowed freedom for follow-up open questions. Specific aspects of the innovation processes in some of the selected cases have been analysed and published elsewhere, for instance, on the role of entrepreneurship [42], insti- tutions [43] or social innovation [15,44], the role of policies in a transition context [45], and in a product-specific [21,22] and a region-specific analysis [46,47]. This article adds to the previous analyses by a comparative analysis across all cases and through a comprehensive analysis of all dimensions of innovation processes. It strives to carve out characteristic innovation patterns within the various elements of analysis as well as across all dimensions. From this comprehensive analysis, we derive typical support needs to foster innovation in NWFPs in Europe and illustrate with concrete examples their potential to contribute to the overall transformation to a bioeconomy. 2.2. The Innovation System Approach In this paper, we used the innovation system (IS) approach to analyse cases. According to Rametsteiner and Weiss [48], the main elements of IS are actors and institutions and their interactions. Actors are usually considered organizations, that are the “players of the game” and that together play a major role in influencing innovative performance [38]. Institutions are the “rules of the game” that are maintaining interactions between actors [49]. Institutions are set of habits, rules, laws, or regulations that shape the relations and interac- tions among actors [50]. Innovation thus occurs within networks of diverse actors (public, semi-public or private organizations) that are embedded in a system of institutions that support them. IS approach can focus on national, but also on local, rural or regional inno- vation systems or networks [51,52], or which particularly include institutional and social processes and factors (embeddedness, grassroots, social, institutional, [53,54]). Framework factors include: ecological (e.g., climate and site conditions), economic (e.g., wealth and innovativeness), political-institutional (legal regulations, political culture and informal norms), and social (e.g., social change). Within the innovation processes, we particularly focus on the role of knowledge/information, financing, and cooperation/coordination of actors [55], understood as different kinds of support measures which may be provided by various public or private actors of the innovation system. Throughout the innovation process, we follow especially from which spheres (rural or urban) and from which sectors (forestry or other sectors) the ideas or support measures were provided. We assume that NWFPs differ from other rural products because of their specific entrepreneurial, insti- tutional, and social contexts. With NWFPs, we very often find smaller firms and lower levels of professionalization, commercialization, and institutional support structures when compared with large-scale forestry products or agricultural crops [43,47,56–58]. 2.3. Operationalized Analysis Elements For the comparative analysis of the cases, we operationalized the described innovation system approach and previous findings on innovation processes in forestry and specifically on NWFP [38,59,60] in order to develop our analytical structure, i.e., the main actor being
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