Responsible Design Thinking for Sustainable Development: Critical Literature Review, New Conceptual Framework, and Research Agenda

In the 1960s, influential thinkers defined design as a rational problem-solving approach to deal with the challenges of sustainable human development. In 2009, a design consultant and a business academic selected some of these ideas and successfully branded them with the term “design thinking.” As a result, design thinking has developed into...

Initiating a Minimum Viable Ecosystem for Circularity

To achieve a transformation toward the circular economy, organizations need to take an ecosystem perspective and consider multiple complementary actors that are needed to deliver circularity as a collective outcome. However, practitioners and scholars lack an understanding of the initial phases of ecosystem creation, in terms of how to get...

Why Circular Business Models Fail And What To Do About It: A Preliminary Framework And Lessons Learned From A Case In The European Union (Eu)

The circular economy aims to decouple economic growth from negative environmental impacts. To achieve this goal, circular economy concepts and policies must be implemented in practice by organizations through new circular business models. However, organizations often fail to implement circular business models on the market at scale. This is a...

Addressing the design-implementation gap of sustainable business models by prototyping: A tool for planning and executing small-scale pilots

Next to the redesign of industrial products and processes, sustainable business model innovation is a strategic approach to integrate environmental and social concerns into the objectives and operations of organizations. One of the major challenges of this approach is that many promising business model ideas fail to reach the market, which is...

Implementing sustainable design theory in business practice: A call to action

The intensification of industrial activity within an unsustainable development paradigm caused an alarming environmental crisis intertwined with societal problems on a global scale. Sustainable design theory contains an extensive body of knowledge on how these environmental and societal issues can be addressed by rethinking industrial...

Circular business model experimentation: Demystifying assumptions: Demystifying assumptions

Circular business model experiments may help firms transition towards a circular economy. Little is known about how the participants of experimentation – entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, innovation managers – develop and test their assumptions during the experimentation process to achieve more circular outcomes. Using a design-science approach,...

The evolution of the Strategic role of Designers for Sustainable Development

Design for Sustainable Development refers to the application of a design process to solve a problem related to sustainability, such as creating a pair of shoes that can be recycled or managing waste collection in a large city. Since the origins of this concept in the 1960s, Design for Sustainable Development has been evolving, gradually...

Strategic Design of Sustainable Business Models

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Industrial Symbiosis: Towards a design process for eco-industrial clusters by integrating Circular Economy and Industrial Ecology perspectives

Industrial Symbiosis (IS) is a collective approach to competitive advantage in which separate industries create a cooperative network to exchange materials, energy, water and/or by-products. By addressing issues related to resource depletion, waste management and pollution, IS plays an important role in the transition towards sustainable...

Sustainable business model experimentation by understanding ecologies of business models

Sustainable business model innovation is about creating superior customer and firm value by addressing societal and environmental needs through the way business is done. Business models require intentional design if they are to deliver aspired sustainability impacts. Scant research has been done on ‘ecologies’ of different business models in...

Bridging sustainable business model innovation and user-driven innovation: A process for sustainable value proposition design

With an increasing population, a growing middle class and increased resource use, our current ways of living and doing business are unsustainable. Next to the implementation of innovative technology, sustainable development based on innovative business models, better understating of customer needs and behavioural change are crucial. This...