Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund (ESCP Berlin Chair of Corporate Sustainability and European Academic Director for the Master in Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Innovation programme) wrote an article on "The Conversation" regarding the research he conducted with Prof. Stefan Gold and Prof. Nancy Bocken where they reviewed circular economy literature.
 
While many ideas for the design of business models for the circular economy have been put forward, providing a comprehensive overview of them always proves to be difficult because of the sheer volume of case studies and theories out there.
 

This is what Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund and his colleagues aimed to solve with their research where they explored the variety of circular economy business models in an April 2018 article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (freely available through 2019) and found 26 major business model types, including for example “remanufacturing”, “waste exchange”, and “product-as-a-service”. These business model types reveal a lot about the numerous design options for the development of circular economy business models.

Researchers and supply chain managers, business and product developers, innovation managers, and other practitioners working to make their businesses more sustainable can benefit from this research. An astonishing variety of design options were found, including numerous value propositions, customer relationships, or supply chain approaches to close material and energy flows. Theoretically speaking, this variety allows for the development of more than 4 million different business model designs for the circular economy... news article continued here on "The Conversation".

 Click here for their April 2018 article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

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