Circular Collaborations in Urban space

Abstract

A circular economy is a means to an end of achieving a sustainable world, a lot of traction has been gained in the recent years into the concept of a circular economy and many new products and business models have been created around the concept. But most of the exploration of the concept lies in the possibilities of new product and market opportunities, this makes the concept difficult to move towards a societal level change, where circular economy becomes the norm. To enable this societal level change, ecosystem level innovations are important and collaborations play a key role in enabling eco-system innovation. This is what this project tries to explore, collaborations for a circular economy, in the context of the urbanspace. The findings suggested that a shared vision is important for collaboration to take place but the organisations did not actively pursue for having a shared vision and values with their various collaborators, instead the thing that they focused on for operationalizing their innovation was engagement. They focused on engagement to showcase the value of their organisation’s offering beyond the end product. As they increased their visibility in the urbanspace and increased their ways and number of engagements, the organisations grew and people with similar values collaborated with the organisations. They scaled through engagement. Scaling through engagement is a mindset for growth of the organisation based on engagement as opposed to the linear model of thinking of making more. The final design, tried to enable organisations operating in the urbanspace to scale through engagement. This was pursued by creation of an online tool-kit for circular organisations operating in the urbanspace, which aimed at creating awareness into the concept of scaling through engagement, it’s relating ideas and also help organisations create ideas around scaling through engagement for their own organisation. In conclusion, this project is a step in the right direction away from scaling by making more and towards scaling through engagement. Apart from the tool-kit, the findings from the research add valuable insights into how circular organisations operating in the urbanspace innovate and collaborate in a circular economy. On a broader perspective, this project gives a glimpse into how societal level transitions for a circular economy could take place and what it would mean in practice.