Circular Ecosystems: how do we build the capacity to act at the system level?
Ashley Olsson, David Hicks & Emanuele Di Francesco Circular economy opportunities often depend on relationships between firms, material flows, infrastructure and investment decisions. System-level intelligence can help regions assess how new companies, capabilities and infrastructure could strengthen circular industrial development, rather than evaluating investments only in isolation. Governance mechanisms are essential to turn that intelligence […]
Don’t Waste the Data: The strategic value of traceability for competitive circular markets
Phil Brown & Emanuele Di Francesco Compliance is triggering investments in traceability, but should not define its value. The same systems built to meet regulatory requirements can support wider business decisions and new commercial opportunities. Shared and interoperable information is needed to track materials across multiple companies, demonstrate closed-loop recovery and avoid double counting. Visibility […]
Policy Must Distribute Productive Capacity to Avoid a Rentier Circular Economy
Ken Webster & Emanuele Di Francesco As circularity becomes central to industrial policy and resource security, it also shapes who creates value and who captures it. How we imagine circularity matters. Viewing the economy as “pipework” encourages optimisation and concentration around strategic bottlenecks, while a living systems perspective highlights resilience, diversity and distributed productive capabilities. […]
Markets Alone Won’t Fix the Circular Economy: the Case for Regional Planning Boards
The transition towards a circular economy requires a new capacity to anticipate future resource systems and translate that knowledge and foresight into industrial development, investment decisions and regional competitiveness. Planning, understood not as a mechanism of central control but as the reduction of uncertainty and the coordination of future economic development, may be one of […]
Scaling Circularity Beyond the Business Model
Why the future of the circular economy may depend not only on business models, but on the coordination infrastructures that allow them to scale. Circular economy research has paid significant attention to circular business models, circular supply chains and circular ecosystems. This is important, but the ability of these models to scale also (if not, […]
Sufficiency Needs Viable Transformation Pathways
Sufficiency discussions have been scoring significant advances in defining ecological limits, fair consumption spaces and demand reduction objectives, both at the macro- (policies) and micro-(individual lifestyles) levels. A key question, however, still remains underdeveloped: how do societies collectively reorganize provisioning systems in ways that are socially, politically, economically and institutionally viable within planetary boundaries? If […]
Why Business Innovation Needs an Updated Vocabulary
Today’s innovation processes are still underpinned by a vocabulary shaped by the assumption of effectively unlimited and low-cost, low-impact access to resources. That framing continues to be at the core of how value creation and competitiveness are understood, how innovation is measured, and what is designed to deliver. In practice, vocabulary feeds into metrics, metrics […]
ENKORE: Designing a sustainable future for the European Healthcare Sector
Supported by IHI: With a duration of 48 months, the project has a total budget of €18,88 million; €7,74 million is funded by the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI JU) under grant agreement No 101166707. The remaining €11,14 million is contributed by the consortium’s industry partners (€9,10million) as well as the associated countries partners (€2,04 million). […]
ISO 59014 – Setting a New Standard for Sustainability and Traceability in Secondary Materials
The newly published ISO 59014:2024 establishes a benchmark for sustainability and traceability in recycled materials, providing organizations with principles, requirements, and guidance to promote responsible and efficient resource use. In line with ISO’s commitment to a life cycle perspective and circular economy, this standard strengthens efforts to reduce dependence on virgin materials, mitigate environmental risks, […]
Commodities, Supply Chains & the Energy Transition: Navigating Complexity in a Fragmented World
The energy transition relies on securing critical raw materials (CRMs), but supply chains are fragile, opaque and shaped by geopolitical and regulatory pressures. At the recent event co-hosted by the World Resources Forum, Glencore and Zug Commodity Association in Zug (Switzerland), experts from industry, policy and research explored the evolving role of commodity trading and […]