Before judgments, the facts.
Is the story of Bio-On worth revisiting?
Some stories seem to end at the very moment they enter the public domain. For a few weeks, they dominate newspaper front pages, lead television news broadcasts, and become a subject of discussion in cafés, offices and on social media. Then, almost suddenly, they disappear. They remain in the collective memory through a handful of images and words—just enough to make us believe we know everything there was to know.
This happens with many industrial and financial events. Over time, the narrative tends to be reduced to its ending, often in simplistic terms, stripping the story of its complexity. The years pass, the documents multiply and new reconstructions emerge, yet public memory becomes increasingly simple. In the end, only a few certainties remain, almost always built around the most dramatic events. Everything that came before them slowly disappears.
The story of Bio-On is probably one of them.
If we asked one hundred people today what they remember about the company, their answers would be easy to imagine. A company that promised to revolutionise the world of plastics. Remarkable growth. A stock-market listing. The collapse of its share price. Bankruptcy. For many, the story ends there, as though the entire affair could be contained within those few events.
And yet, whenever I have reopened the folders containing the documents from those years, I have felt that I was looking at a different story. Not because I found a hidden truth or a definitive answer, but because I rediscovered a world that seems to have almost completely vanished from the public narrative.
Before the newspaper headlines, there were years of work.
Before the controversy, there were laboratories.
Before the debate, there were patents, market studies, technical assessments, collaborations with universities and research centres, and documents prepared for investors and supervisory authorities.
That is precisely what surprised me.
When an event is remembered only through its epilogue, we risk forgetting everything that preceded it. It is rather like reading only the final chapter of a novel and believing that we know its characters. We may know how it ends, but we do not truly know how they got there.
For this reason, rather than starting from the conclusions, I decided to take the opposite path.
I started with the documents.
Documents written when Bio-On was simply a company trying to turn an industrial project into a business. They were not prepared to support a thesis or mount a defence in court, but to describe an idea, assess its feasibility, measure its risks, and explain to investors, advisers and technical experts the path that had been envisaged.
It is an exercise I recommend to anyone wishing to form an opinion about this case.
Not because those documents automatically prove that someone was right or wrong, but because they help us understand the context in which the story began.
In June 2014, for example, A.T. Kearney, one of the world's leading strategic consulting firms, produced a study of the global bioplastics market and the industrial prospects for PHAs. Its task was not to tell Bio-On's story, but to determine whether the technology could find a place in a rapidly changing market, characterised by growing interest in alternatives to conventional plastics.
During the same period, Professor Augusto Di Giulio of Politecnico di Milano and engineer Roberto Piattoli, a leading figure in Italian industrial engineering, visited the Minerbio pilot plant, analysed the production process, and prepared a technical report on the technology developed by the company and its prospects for industrial development. Once again, this was not an opinion offered in an interview or television debate, but a technical assessment prepared as part of the process that would lead the company towards its stock-market listing.
A few months later, as the project prepared to enter the capital markets, Professor Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School was asked to assess the business model adopted by the company. At the same time, the AIM Italia Admission Document was taking shape: the official document through which Bio-On presented itself to investors, describing not only the project's opportunities but also its risks and uncertainties, its patents, scientific collaborations, industrial structure and development goals.
Reading those pages again today, one aspect is especially striking.
They portray a company that was still entirely to be built. A company that openly described its ambitions, but also the difficulties of an innovative technological project. They speak of research, experimentation, industrial development, patents, investment and risk. They do not tell a story whose ending had already been written. They tell the story of a venture.
And perhaps ‘venture' is the word that, more than any other, accompanies innovation.
Every technology, at its birth, is a venture.
For those who develop it.
For those who choose to finance it.
For those who invest in it.
Even for those who choose to study it.
Some of these ventures change the world. Others do not succeed. Many follow paths far more tortuous than anyone could have imagined at the outset.
Understanding the nature of the Bio-On venture is the reason this editorial project was created.
Not to rewrite a story that now belongs to Italian industrial history, nor to suggest what conclusion the reader should draw.
But, more simply, to make available a body of documents that, in most cases, was ignored by the public debate—overwhelmed by rhetorical newspaper headlines—and never entered that debate with the same force as those headlines.
Each week, we will select one of those documents, or a group of related documents, and examine them together. Sometimes they will confirm widely held beliefs. At other times, they will offer new evidence. In some cases, they will leave open questions to which, even today, there is no simple or unequivocal answer.
This, after all, is how any serious inquiry proceeds.
It does not start with conclusions.
It starts with questions.
And perhaps the first question to ask is not about what happened afterwards.
It is about what already existed.
Because before every judgment, before interpretations and before opinions, there is always a story that deserves to be known.
And it is precisely with that story that we will begin.
Who we are and who wrote this article
To understand the BIO-ON dossier in all its present-day relevance and complexity, one fact must be considered: over the years, this case has been told through thousands of articles, television reports, commentaries and public debates. Far less attention has been devoted to directly examining the documents that accompanied the company's creation, development and subsequent history. This observation gave rise to an editorial project with a precise objective: to collect, organise and make accessible the principal documents relating to the Bio-On case, accompanied by explanatory articles that make them easier to read and understand. The initiative, ‘Understanding the BIO-ON Case'—prompted by a large group of former small Bio-On investors—has created an editorial team made up of professionals with experience in different fields: industry, academia, innovation, finance, law, scientific research and communications. They collaborate on a voluntary basis to select sources, verify documentation and write the articles. The editorial approach is straightforward: every in-depth analysis begins with documents alone. For this reason, whenever possible, each article is accompanied by the original materials on which it is based, so that every reader may consult them freely, directly and at no cost, and form an independent opinion. The project does not seek to replace the work of the judiciary, supervisory authorities, scholars or the media. Rather, it aims to offer a space in which documents, data and sources can be examined with the time and attention that such a complex case deserves.
