Systemic building blocks for creating and capturing value from circular economy

The idea of a circular economy has generated widespread academic, policy and business interest for its potential to address economic, ecological and societal concerns posed by current production and consumption systems. The growth in the number of academic publications reflects a period of critique, clarification and validation leading to research challenges, questions and a call for real world evidence of how the ideas translate into practice, evidence of outcomes and operational effectiveness. Whilst there has been extensive research into the classifications of circular business models, these are rarely linked to a discussion of actual circular value realisation within real world settings. In this paper we draw on three illustrative examples used within a global executive education programme to reflect on the locus of circular value creation and capture. Specifically, we explore the role and interplay of four configurable ‘building blocks’: circular design, business models, reverse network management and system enablers, as a potentially useful heuristic to describe how businesses are realising value from their circular economy practices. These cases illustrate that the success of large scale value creation and capture derives from the iteration of multiple, boundary spanning activities emerging over time in varying configurations. There is now a need to move from classification and description to quantification and testing of how value is created and captured from circular economy in different contexts. Circular economy validation requires rapid growth in building a credible research evidence base of successful case examples