The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding for the challenges and opportunities inherent to the cross-sectoral development of the bioeconomy. It takes the project “Forest Chemistry” as a case study, which was a collaboration project between Swedish forest industry and petrochemical industry clusters with the goal to develop forest based value chains for production of commodity chemicals. The project considered forest-based production of methanol, ethylene, propylene and butanol. We discuss the project and its outcomes from an innovation systems perspective applying a framework for technological innovation systems analysis. The original Forest Chemistry project also led to a number of spin-off projects, some of which are covered by this paper.