Last decade’s major discoveries in glycosciences have triggered new economic activities often developed within start-ups or biotechs and mostly driven by the PhD students and post-docs involved in the initial research projects. These burgeoning economic entities, along with Contract Research Organisations (CROs), represent attractive new career opportunities alongside academia and big industry.

To push forward this burgeoning glycoeconomy, many new talents are needed to meet the many challenges ahead: transformation of natural resources, production of (rare) monosaccharides or building blocks for synthesis, structurally well-defined oligosaccharides, new molecular glycosyl-based platforms, improved technologies including enzymes and automated synthesis, development of technical platforms for faster structural elucidation (including antibodies and lectins), deciphering the interactions involving carbohydrates, molecular modelling, etc.