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The operational environment of the forest sector is becoming more complex, and maintaining competitiveness has become increasingly complicated. At the industry or firm level, competitiveness is seen as the ability to perform better than competitors in terms of value creation over time. Relatively little is known about changes in firm-level competitiveness caused by the shifting dynamics of the competitive situation in the forest sector toward the bioeconomy. A systematic literature review is conducted to examine how competitiveness of the sector is analyzed at the firm level and what are seen as its most influential drivers. Furthermore, these findings are discussed in the context of the bioeconomy transition. The results show that strategies and firm characteristics related to innovation and differentiation provide the key for understanding competitiveness at the firm level. Literature focuses on describing the competitive dynamics between firms within an industry rather than across sectors, despite that substitution between materials as well as intersectoral R&D collaboration are strongly advocated by national and international bioeconomy strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extant literature concerned with enhancing competitiveness of forest sector companies has focused on phenomena rather than people who would drive those phenomena. Generally, human resource management research is sparse in the forest sector literature, despite well-documented knowledge that companies succeed more because of their people than because of any other factor. This article brings human resource issues to the core conversation in forest sector competitiveness research. Specifically, we focus on the link between gender diversity in top leadership and firm financial performance and suggest pathways to improve workforce diversity. The timing of our study is fortuitous, as the graying workforce in the sector will create space for a new generation of leaders. Our argument is that diversity issues should be more proactively addressed in forest sector workforce recruitment not just because it is the right thing to do, but also because it has an underlying business case. This is an exploratory study, which is a first step in paving the way for future work on diversity management among forest sector companies. Our findings suggest that more gender diverse top management teams are associated with higher financial performance but that the level of gender diversity in boards of directors has no association with financial performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When a company is integrated vertically, it can manage and plan its overall value chain in one direct and integrated approach. However in many cases, companies follow a decoupled approach where forests and production plants optimize separately their processes in a supply-driven strategy. In Chile, the two largest forest companies are vertically integrated (i.e., they own forest and mills that produce logs, lumber, plywood, pulp, paper, and bioenergy, etc.). Historically, they have coordinated their value chains using a make-to-stock strategy, for which the forest is the main driver of the value chain activities. In this paper, we propose an integrated planning approach to show the impacts of a demand-driven integration of the value chain in the forest industry. To compare this strategy with the decoupled strategy, we propose a mixed integer programming (MIP) model for the integrated strategy. To illustrate our proposal, we use forest and production information from a Chilean forest company. The decoupled strategy, where the forest and industry planning are planned separately, uses two models. The first model deals with the forest management and harvesting decisions and maximizes the expected net present value (NPV) of logs. In this model, the planning horizon covers one full forest rotation, which in Chile corresponds to about 25 years. The second model maximizes the NPV of the downstream operations for a shorter business planning horizon (five years) constrained by the availability of the logs from the first model. In the integrated approach, all parts of the value chain (forest, transportation, and mills) are driven by final product demand and where the objective is to maximize the profit of the company (NPV of the entire value chain). The demand is only given for the shorter business planning horizon. The two strategies are evaluated using the MIP model, and NPV is used to determine the best practice. According to the results, the NPV can increase up to 5.0% when the proposed integrated strategy is implemented compared to a decoupled strategy. Moreover, the profit for the business period increases up to 8.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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