The value added to supply processed timber or non-wood forest products and to provide tourism or green care services continues to attract more attention. The reason is not only to give rural areas an economic perspective. It also may be in response to regional or national policies, such as the EU Bio-Economy and Circular Economy program with the challenges of climate change. The cascade usage paradigm for material and energy use and the separation of high value from low value assortments to supply various wood-processing industries - a peculiarity of forestry - increases resource efficiency. Accordingly, this specific production system, coupled with multifunctional service provision, requires adaptive and innovative business models and the application of digital hub solutions to bundle interdisciplinary strengths, merge rural-urban competences, and develop innovative supply chains for new and emerging markets.

This Working Party focuses on calculation schemes to compute and compare value added, models to optimize the interrelations between the down-stream processing industries, business solutions to address the interests of profit-orientated actors and regional wellbeing, challenges to entering new and emerging markets, and market behavior models. These wide-ranging multi-method approaches introduce interesting views for enlightening the regional value added from an economic but also socio-cultural perspective. New models are required to capture the relevant production factors and outputs, along the value-added chain: from the supplied raw materials and the refined products, to the profit and taxes generated. Moreover, the contributions of providing insights into the competitiveness of regional and international value-added chains or the latent conflict between micro- economic interests and macro-economic benefits are also addressed.

This Working Party also explores the theory of value chain, with a focus on inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, emphasizing crosscutting themes and motivations for supplementing the "buyer-driven" and "producer-driven" modes of global commodity chains in forestry. Analyzed chains are concentrated on innovative and emerging products, address horizontal and vertical interlinkages of the down-stream wood processing industries and their intermediate suppliers, and illustrate their socio-cultural value for the region.