Identifying the opportunities of the circular economy is crucial for any business to keep pace with volatile markets and strengthen resilience.

Our offering, “Identify Circular Opportunities,” describes a lighthouse program. We define circular opportunities unique to the client’s ecosystem and supply chain. We create a sustainable product concept ready to implement. It is often paired with a consultation for organizational transformation that encourages the client’s employees to gain collective knowledge and structural capacity to achieve the new purpose. Our integrative approach guides companies on their strategic path for leading the circular economy and the purpose-driven innovation achieved by highly engaged staff.

We follow an internal blueprint structured in individual sprints. Each component builds on the other and is flexible enough to be agile.
Let us highlight some elements and efforts leading our clients to success.

Identifying circular opportunities

I Understand

In the beginning, a shared understanding of the client’s status on sustainability and innovation and each business unit’s goal on circularity, its business objective, and future activities is crucial.

Based on interviews, a summary of stakeholder insights builds the foundation to identify the target product segment with the highest potential for circular product innovation and sustainable impact.

Full-day workshops, including all relevant business units and deep dives into future scenarios sketched out by our experts, usually lead to heated discussions. But in the end, the participants can decide based on transparent factors:

  • Market competition vs. impact on circular economy
  • Customer value vs. feasibility (technical requirements and constraints)
  • Revenue (business viability) vs. feasibility (technical requirements and regulations) for one product segment or SKU to focus on.

II Discover

To understand the ecosystem of the chosen product segment and its drivers and enablers for circularity, the team collectively formulates an ecosystem map of the selected product segment ecosystem. This highlights the resource, material flow, and product components throughout the supply, storage, and production stages.

Together we identify stakeholders and their interactions within the ecosystem, gaps and pain points, and opportunities for creating a circular product. And we can define success criteria to measure our decision’s impact.

We collect the Voices of Ecosystem (aka external or partner stakeholder interviews) and start the in-depth assessment of

  • Energy efficiency
  • CO2 emission reduction
  • Material optimization
  • R-strategies
  • Business Model Innovation
  • And much more.

All answers concern the constraints and enablers for circular product development, market requirements, and customer wishes for circular solutions.

III Map

In the final step, we set the strategic development path for the validated circular opportunity to guide the company’s circular product innovation.

All workshop results are synthesized and synchronized with the sustainable business goals. The core team facilitates the discussion to define the go-to product, including benchmarks, competition, potential value propositions, competitive advantages, etc.

The group revisits the success criteria and impact measures (defined before) to discuss the next steps for creating the first circular product. Finally, the crew devises a development plan that involves:

  • Necessary resources
  • Immediate actions
  • Potential team and resources
  • Cross-sector collaboration
  • And a sounding board.

The steps Understand, Discover, and Map are consistently applied from scratch but flexible enough to be tailor-made for your endeavor.

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