The main objective of the Action was to gain a better understanding of the problems and possible solutions of the forest-based entrepreneurship in small-scale forestry, wood processing and non-wood forest products and services aiming at improved employment and income in rural areas. One of the main achievements of the Action was the provision of harmonised state of the art information and data relevant for forest sector entrepreneurship in Europe. These results were published in Action workshop proceedings; including information and data on production, consumption and demand structures of wood, non-wood products and services, and characteristics of forest sector production conditions e.g. resources, ownership patterns and forestry practices. This information provides a first systematic basis to identify the state of the art of the conditions for enterprise development in the forest sector in Europe. A further main scientific achievement of the Action was the analysis of (i) factors affecting the competitiveness of forest – wood / non-wood / services – consumer chain, (ii) the main barriers and prospects to entrepreneurship, and (iii) problems and opportunities for enterprise development in the forest sector at the European level. The results of these analyses illustrate, that forest ownership is considerably fragmented and forest owners’ attitudes and values very diversified; thus it is uncertain how private forests can maintain their role to support increasing timber demand in the future. It is also evident on the basis of the Action results that increasing demand on green products and services in the future may not result into sufficient amount of new entrepreneurship because traditional wood production culture dominates in forest sector institutions in Europe. The analyses and results on the three questions above were presented in 17 scientific papers in the final workshop held in January 2006 and published in the workshop proceedings. A set of these research papers will be elaborated further and published in a special issue of the Small-scale forestry journal in 2007. COST E30 made substantial progress in collecting and elaborating the existing information on forest sector entrepreneurship. Through its achievements, the Action has brought the issue of entrepreneurship more strongly in the agenda of forest research in Europe. The results of the Action – summarised in the final report – are likely to bring forward new forest-based businesses and business related research in the future. A highly informative web-site was established at http://www.joensuu.fi/coste30/. The website contains information on Action results and other relevant information and publications on forest sector entrepreneurship.
