Andrea Urbinati

Innovative Circular Business Models (CBMs) can extend product and material lifecycles through reduction, reuse, recycling, and recovery. Achieving this, however, requires guidance from the performance management field. Most existing Performance Management Systems (PMS) focus primarily on material metrics, like recycling rates or waste volumes, often overlooking the role of managerial practices in CBMs. Addressing this gap, our research introduces the Circular Business Scorecard (CBS), a PMS based on Balanced Scorecard theory that integrates managerial practices for CBMs. The CBS includes four perspectives, encompassing financial and non-financial dimensions, to support the circular economy (CE) transition. Tested in a manufacturing case study, the CBS enabled the creation of a strategic map, highlighting two main pathways for companies moving toward CE: one pathway emphasizes cost reduction through eco-efficiency, while the other focuses on increased turnover driven by product design for circularity. Our contribution offers a structured, process-oriented approach, providing scholars and practitioners with a practical, step-by-step guide to implementing a PMS that supports CE transition.

The combination of the industrial paradigms of Circular Economy (CE), Industry 4.0 (I40), and Lean Production (LP) has been debated by academics and practitioners in the last years, demonstrating that I40 technologies and LP enable CE, and that I40 and LP mutually support each other. The analyses conclude that several economic and environmental benefits can be achieved from these synergies. However, given most of the studies in literature focused on the dual combination between these paradigms, there is a need for understanding how all three are related to each other simultaneously. Accordingly, the proposed research defines a model that shows how the circular transition of manufacturing companies can be enhanced through the exploitation of LP practices and the key enabling technologies of I40. To achieve this result, the proposed research conducts a bibliometric review of the literature extracted from Scopus, exploiting a systematic literature network analysis methodology to detect and then analyze clusters of themes. The study observed that employing LP practices and I40 technologies support manufacturing companies towards a more effective circular transition and proposes future research avenues to be addressed by future studies at the intersection between the topics of I40, LP, and CE.

The fashion industry, amid its highest growth and prosperity, stands amongst the most polluting and socially abusive industries. To curtail these trends, the research stream of circular business models (CBMs) recently emerged as a new one to focus on the preservation of resources and/ or promoting societal wellbeing through slowing and closing material loops. As the success of CBMs also relies on customer engagement, which still remains an under-researched area, this paper aims to unearth the relative importance of circularity and customers’ willingness-to-pay for each selected attribute. Based upon a choice-based conjoint analysis (n=365), this paper shows that circularity is an important attribute for engaging customers, followed by price, quality, and brand. Interestingly, higher levels of circularity go along with a lower customer engagement and a lower willingness-to-pay, if customers are neither incentivized (e.g., through discount initiatives) nor educated (through awareness raising activities) towards the purchase of circular products.

The implementation of circular economy poses a challenge for companies, as they are called to rethink and redesign their business models also by using digital technologies. However, current research struggles to clarify how companies can exploit digital technologies for circular economy. The present work aims at understanding the potential role of 3D Printing in the value creation dimension of circular business models. To address this research gap, we develop a conceptual framework that opens up the black box of 3D Printing and connects its detailed features with a potential set of managerial practices in the circular business model dimension of value creation (and that these 3D Printing's features might enable). Based on this framework, we provide some future research directions that will hopefully inform future studies on this topic.

Several actors – including governments, academics, and NGOs – are calling for an urgent shift to circular economy. Nevertheless, few research attention centers on tools or frameworks to support organizations engaged in the creation of circular value. This research leverages design thinking in the field of business model innovation, with the aim to uncover its implications for circular value co-creation. Based upon a multiple case study design, this research shows that higher levels of cybernetics coupled with a more circular mindset can contribute to the creation of circular value, but only the highest levels of cybernetics in combination with a highest circular mindset result in self-sustaining circular value in systems in which multiple stakeholders are engaged. The theoretical and managerial implications emphasize the contribution of design thinking in the process of implementing circular business models and the concept of circular self-sustaining value as central to their success.

Circular economy has become a hot topic for scholars and practitioners as it represents a new industrial paradigm for waste generation, resource scarcity and sustainable economic growth that aims to overcome open systems paradigms, based on the traditional make, take, and disposal process. Whereas this issue has posed a lot of attention to the policies of circular economy as guidelines for policymakers, we still lack of consolidated managerial directions that support companies to implement this paradigm. In other words, although several scientific contributions started to shift the attention from macro (policies) to micro (company) levels of analysis, the issue of which managerial practices companies have to adopt for circular economy implementation still deserves particular attention. Although this literature gap continues persisting, several scholars have opened up the research stream of circular economy business models, which tries to analyze the business model design choices in the light of circular economy principles. Accordingly, we revise the main scientific contributions that analyze the managerial practices for circular economy business models. In doing so, we propose in a comprehensive theoretical framework a map of the managerial practices for circular economy business models that can be adopted at two different business model dimensions, i.e., the value network and the customer value proposition and interface. Therefore, we will test the suitability of our framework on a small medium Italian company operating in office supply industry for 23 years, by looking into the managerial practices that this company has implemented.

Big Data has emerged as a new digital paradigm that companies implement to transform existing business models and nurture their innovation activity. This has provided the emergence of a rich domain in terms of managerial and practical implications, typically addressed from the user perspective. However, we still lack a complete understanding of how companies that provide Big Data solutions can create and capture value from these solutions. Therefore, this paper explores the question how provider companies create and capture value from Big Data technology, drawing on a multiple case study analysis. The results present two main innovation service strategies based on Big Data technology and highlight how the stakeholders' network influences the relationship between strategy development and the effectiveness of the provider companies innovation process.

Innovation scholars have long studied how and why innovations diffuse in the market following determined trajectories, such as the S-curve or the Bell-curve (Tarde, 1903; Ryan & Gross, 1943; Rogers, 1962; Shilling, 2005). However, we see today many new products and services – especially those enabled by digital technologies – that do not seem to fit to the above-mentioned models due to the incredibly high speed at which they diffuse. Moreover, the diffusion of these innovations does not seem to depend – contrary to what the previous models argue – on their technological characteristics or on demand-side factors, such as the feedback they receive from their early adopters (Moore, 1991; Shilling, 1998; Chiesa and Frattini, 2011). Rather, their diffusion seems to be affected by particular characteristics of the business model adopted by the organisations that have created and commercialized them. Therefore, our study aims to analyse the role of business model design choices in the diffusion of this type of innovations. We do so by analysing a sample of innovations launched by the so-called Unicorn tech-companies, which have experienced incredibly fast diffusion rates and business growth and are disrupting entire industries. The empirical analysis is based on the historical research method (Gottschalk, 1969).