Treesearch is a collaboration platform for research and competence building for new materials from the forest, started in 2017. Treesearch is a national initiative where the academic and industrial sectors work together with private foundations and the central government to create a world-leading open research environment for the future bioeconomy.
Treesearch coordinates and supports the research on new materials from the forest. All researchers and research projects at Swedish universities are able to join and participate in the platform. The Wallenberg Wood Science Center is the core of the research activities in the platform and the starting point for Treesearch.
The success of WWSC was the starting point for the creation of the research platform Treesearch, where the work on the development of the platform started with a seminar at KTH, set up by WWSC in December 2014.
During the seminar, the industry’s need for competent personnel and new knowledge was discussed to meet the challenge of developing a future competitive Swedish forest industry. It was also discussed that to compete with other materials, the research should be at the highest scientific level and have access to advanced experimental tools. Not only aiming at pioneering discoveries but also to create attractiveness supporting the universities’ recruitment of students to education related to the needs of the forest industry and the industry’s own recruitment.
The seminar resulted in a project connected to WWSC with the aim of creating a national environment for engaging academia and industry in a joint venture on research and development in the field of materials and speciality chemicals from forest raw materials. The project was led by KTH and Chalmers and was conducted with Billerud, Holmen, SCA, Stora Enso, Sveaskog and Södra.
The result of the project was the creation of the collaboration platform Treesearch, where WWSC today is a core research activity that utilizes the platform and where other research activities are invited to join and use the platform. Since its start in 2017, more organisations have been associated as Treesearch partners, and the platform is now open for researchers and projects.
