Managing a Complex Global Circular Economy Business Model: Opportunities and Challenges

What is it about?

This article presents an in-depth case study detailing the history, experiences, and wider practitioner and policy lessons from a circular economy business model over a 30-year period, highlighting the successes, difficulties, and conflicts of adopting a circular economy model. The case is based on interviews, key documents, and customer insight. The findings demonstrate how sustained circular economy business practices can deliver significant new revenues, resource productivity, and business continuity benefits, but also require managers and practitioners to develop competencies and capabilities, such as balancing linear and circular systems, to address complex and highly dynamic factors, including rapid technological shifts and market volatility.

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Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- The emergence of the circular economy as a potential new managerial perspective to creating sustained competitive requires case studies to demonstrate both the business case and the challenged and capabilities to manage the transitions to achieving scale. This paper provides a detailed, credible and long term analysis of how one well-known circular economy business model continues to be managed and developed through increasingly complex and volatile phases. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- This paper highlights the role of key managers, practices and decisions at various points in time that have been required to scale the circular business model and respond to key challenges and strategic opportunities. Successful circular economy practices requires the ability to identify value creation potential from the integration of circular design practices, business model configurations, the management of revise networks and respond to changing system conditions and enablers. A key lesson and requirement is to have visibility and capabilities to be able to manage decisions across multiple circular value loops, products and geographies. ---------------------------- Author Perspective ---------------------------- There is a dearth of detailed and credible case studies into the claims made for business advantage from the circular economy. The motivation for this paper was therefore to investigate the actual practices and experiences of a large scale circular economy business model and provide detailed insight and empirical evidence into the origins, evolution, scaling up over time. A key question we wanted to answer is how, and whether, the specific case has delivered sustained business advantage over time and what lessons can be drawn from this example for wider managerial practice and policy. Our intention was also to create a framework for the case analysis, based on the four classic circular economy building blocks, which could be used to analyse other cases.