Are we really sure we know this story?
Some stories, as the years go by, seem to become increasingly simple. Not because they actually are, but because time tends to preserve only what makes the strongest impression on the collective imagination: a newspaper headline, a television image, an event destined to become the symbol of an entire story. Everything else slowly fades away.
It is a phenomenon that affects politics, economics, current affairs, and even history. The greater the distance from the events, the more the collective narrative tends to shrink into a handful of shared assumptions. And yet, almost invariably, just as memory becomes simplified, the documents increase. They accumulate in archives, professional offices, universities, court files, and corporate records. They remain there, often forgotten, simply waiting for someone willing to read them again.
The Bio-on story appears to belong to this category.
For most people, the name immediately evokes a sequence of images that have by now become part of the collective memory: a company that promised to revolutionize the bioplastics industry, extraordinarily rapid growth, a stock-market listing, the collapse of its share price, and bankruptcy.
It is an understandable recollection. For months, this was the dominant narrative and, as often happens, the ending ultimately overshadowed everything that had come before.
But every story has a "before." And sometimes, it is precisely there that we find the elements we need to understand it.
Before Bio-on became a widely known public case, there was in fact a long industrial and scientific journey. There were years of research, patents, collaborations with Italian and international universities, market studies, technical assessments, documents prepared for investors, independent analyses, and specialist reports.
These were not documents written to support a particular argument or to respond to an accusation. They simply described an industrial project as that project was taking shape.
And perhaps this is precisely the most surprising aspect.
Many of these documents have been publicly available for more than ten years. Yet, they have rarely entered the public debate with the same force as the easy newspaper headlines.
In 2014, for example, A.T. Kearney – one of the world's leading strategic consulting firms – produced a study1 on the global bioplastics market and the industrial prospects of PHA, the material on which Bio-on had built its project. It was not a promotional document, but a market analysis prepared to assess the potential of a sector that was still in its early stages.
During the same period, Prof. Augusto Di Giulio of Politecnico di Milano and Eng. Roberto Piattoli, former President of ENI Ricerche and Snamprogetti, were commissioned to examine the technology developed by the company and the operation of the pilot plant in Minerbio.
Their report addresses highly concrete issues: the production process, the quality of the plant, the prospects for industrial development, and the technical challenges that still needed to be addressed.
Alongside these assessments, there was also the opinion of Prof. Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School concerning the company's business model, the Admission Document1 prepared for its listing on AIM Italia, scientific studies on PHA conducted by Prof. Francesco Pilati, and collaborations with the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, INSTM, and the University of Hawaiʻi, from which Bio-on had acquired an exclusive license for the technology developed by Jian Yu.
These documents, of course, do not by themselves establish who was right or wrong. Reaching such a conclusion would be just as simplistic as ignoring them altogether.
Their value, however, lies in something that no opinion can replace: they make it possible to reconstruct the context in which that industrial project took shape and allow readers to engage directly with the sources, rather than with someone else's account of them.
This is precisely where this project begins.
Not with the ambition of rewriting a story that is already well known, nor with the claim of replacing the work of others.
It begins with a much simpler objective: to bring order to an extraordinary body of documents and to read them, one after another, with the time and attention they deserve.
Each article will address a single question. It will not begin with a conclusion, but with a source. Every statement will be accompanied by the document it is based, so that readers can verify it for themselves.
Not because they should trust the writer, but because they should be able to form their own judgment on the basis of the very same evidence.
At a time when opinions travel far faster than facts, perhaps it is still worth allowing ourselves a seemingly simple exercise:
read before judging.
It is with this method, before anything else, and even before Bio-on itself, that this journey begins.
Reference documents (abstract)
Attachment 1
How Bio-On presented itself in 2014.
Attachment 2 - Due Diligence Di Giulio – Piattoli
Attachment 3 - Studio A.T. Kearney - Executive Summary.
Attachment 4 - Valutazione Gary Pisano - Curriculum Gary Pisano
Attachment 5 - Cronologia Bio-on 2007-2014 (video)
Who we are and who wrote this article
To understand the BIO-ON case in all its current relevance and complexity, one fact is worth keeping in mind: over the years, this story has been covered in thousands of articles, television reports, commentaries, and public debates. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the direct examination of the documents that accompanied the company's foundation, development, and subsequent events. This observation gave rise to an editorial project with a clear objective: to collect, organize, and make accessible the main documents relating to the BIO-ON case, accompanying them with informative articles designed to facilitate their reading and understanding.
The initiative, "Exploring the BIO-ON Case," prompted by a substantial number of former BIO-ON small investors, has brought together an editorial team of professionals with experience in different fields, including industry, academia, innovation, finance, law, scientific research, and communications. They contribute on a voluntary basis to the selection of sources, the verification of documentation, and the preparation of the articles. The editorial approach is simple: every in-depth analysis starts with the documents. For this reason, whenever possible, each article is accompanied by the original materials used, so that readers can consult them freely, directly, and at no cost, and form their own opinion.
The project does not seek to replace the work of the judicial authorities, regulatory and supervisory bodies, academics, or the media. Rather, it aims to provide a space in which documents, data, and sources can be examined with the time and attention that such a complex story deserves.