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...

Overcoming barriers to circularity for internal ICT management in organizations: A change management approach

Circularity-conscious management of information and communications technology (ICT) owned by organizations is important to achieving a circular economy. However, changes in organizational management toward circularity has been met with multiple challenges. This study uses 11 semi-structured interviews with on-the-ground ICT decision-makers in...

A tool to analyze, ideate and develop circular innovation ecosystems

The circular economy may help firms to maximize the value of their material resources and minimize the overall resource use, waste, pollution and emissions of their business activities. Implementing a circular economy program requires radical changes in product, business model and ecosystem innovation. Most research on circular oriented...

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,...

‘If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Explain It’: The Influence of Visual and Verbal Information about Prior Use on Consumers’ Evaluations of Refurbished Electronics

Refurbishment presents opportunities for designers to improve the sustainability of new and old products via an experiment and post hoc interviews, this research investigates and explores how information about prior use – offered in a visual (signs of wear and tear) or verbal (textual description) form – influences consumers’ evaluations of...

The influence of information about prior use on consumers' evaluations of refurbished electronics

Refurbishment – the process of collecting used products, assessing their condition, and replacing and/or upgrading parts in order to resell them to other consumers – is increasingly seen as both economically and environmentally advantageous. The present research investigates in an experimental study and with qualitative post-hoc interviews how...

The Circular Economy: A new sustainability paradigm?

While the terms Circular Economy and sustainability are increasingly gaining traction with academia, industry, and policymakers, the similarities and differences between both concepts remain ambiguous. The relationship between the concepts is not made explicit in literature, which is blurring their conceptual contours and constrains the...