Come January, Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute will embark on what could be a game-changing project for the forestry and timber sectors in the UK.

The project is being financed by a European Regional Development Fund award matched with money from Forestry Commission Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, ConFor and Wood for Good. In total, the £1.5m project budget is to be used to identify and develop new products, processes and construction systems that use home-grown timber and which can be taken to the point of commercial production over the next three years.

So what’s new and different about this? There have been various initiatives over the years designed to stimulate technical improvements and innovation in the forestry and timber processing sectors – and by extension, greater use of timber and timber products in the construction industry – but not all have been well focused or, indeed, particularly successful. In part, this has been due to the need to adapt existing business development schemes to the particular needs of these sectors, and in part to the lack of awareness and take-up by companies.

This time the project takes a different standpoint: first, to recognise that it is often SMEs that have the best ideas but not necessarily the resources to develop them; second, that initiatives for timber products, processes or building systems do not necessarily come from the forestry and timber processing sectors. That the latter can benefit from new developments is not in dispute, and the project is designed to identify generic opportunities as well as company-specific ones.

The intention is to create business in the forestry and timber sectors and for a host of new products that use home-grown timber reach the market. Already a number of ideas are in gestation that have come from architects and others – all with real bottom-line potential, all with market demand as their driver. The project aims to deliver at least 30 new products and for the moment is Scotland-based only. A similar scheme for the rest of the UK needs to follow.

• Companies interested should contact Peter Wilson at pr.wilson@napier.ac.uk.