Review
Towards Circular Business Models: A systematic literature review on classification frameworks and archetypes

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Abstract

Since many years, companies are trying to cope with impressive technological growth rates, severe environmental issues and even more restrictive national and international directives. However, innovative Business Models (BMs) and industrial strategies adequate to this new context are still either under development or implementation. To this aim, the article proposes a systematic literature review on existing Circular Business Models (CBMs) and their classification methods, by selecting the most promising ones. A total amount of 283 articles related with CBMs has been assessed into detail, by identifying: 5 archetypes, 9 classification methods, 5 adoption-oriented challenges, 4 decision-support tools and 3 additional research areas. Key findings demonstrate that: i) Product-Service Systems (PSSs)-oriented and Reuse, Remanufacturing and Recycling (3R)-based CBMs are the most common archetypes, ii) Business Model Canvas is the most diffused classification framework, iii) sustainability and company-based challenges are the most discussed by the experts and iv) sustainability check-oriented is the most common type of decision-support tools. These (and others) results could support both companies, researchers and governments in updating the current knowledge on CBMs and make them adoptable for practitioners from different industrial contexts.

Introduction

Since many years, companies are trying to cope with the fast technological growth rates, severe environmental issues (Murray et al., 2017; WCED, 1987) and even more restrictive national and international directives (European Commission, 2017, 2011; Mathews and Tan, 2016, 2011). However, innovative Business Models (BMs) and industrial strategies adequate to this new context are still either under development or implementation (Ghezzi and Cavallo, 2019). The need of rethinking and reshaping current production and consumption behaviours emerged from several works (Bocken et al., 2016a; Merli et al., 2018; Pardo, 2018), claiming for further researches on CE-oriented innovative practices, such as sharing economy, product-service systems, dematerialization, remanufacturing and product lifecycles. Considering all these elements, the paper wants to analyse the Circular Business Model (CBM) research context in all its dimensions and make companies aware about them during their shift towards CE. To this aim, a systematic literature review has been conducted. Firstly, a state-of-the-art analysis allowed the identification of macro-areas composing the CBM research context and the most common types of CBMs. Secondly, an in-depth analysis of these macro-areas allowed the understanding of their classification into archetypes. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 defines the research context and its objectives. Section 3 analyses the adopted research methodology to perform the systematic literature review. Section 4 presents and discusses results coming from the literature analysis. Finally, Section 5 provides some concluding remarks and proposes future research areas.

Section snippets

Research context

The entire work is based on two main concepts, as CE and CBMs. This section presents them and tries to clarify their definition.

Research methodology

A systematic literature review has been conducted by following the five steps defined by Denyer and Tranfield (2009). Firstly, the research scope was defined, grabbing valuable knowledge from papers related to both the effects of CE on traditional BMs and methods to classify CBMs. This approach led to the following research questions:

  • RQ1: Which existing BMs can be identified as CBMs?

  • RQ2: What is the most common framework for classifying CBMs?

Trying to improve the searching efficiency,

Thematic analysis

After having identified the limited group of documents that, more than others, can allow to get information about the research questions identified in Section 2, the present section is focused on the thematic analysis of detailed topics listed at the end of the previous section. The aggregate dimension of analysis, named CBM design, is split into seven 2nd order themes (see Fig. 7) and each of them will be described into detail and furtherly divided in 3rd order themes. Subsequently, the focus

Discussion

Wrapping up the results of this research, authors divided CBM research topics in seven dimensions. The starting point of this analysis deals with methods used to classify CBMs, mainly referring to the ReSOLVE framework, the BMC or a mix of them. Other six dimensions offer to both academics and practitioners’ suggestions about: i) best practices and tools supporting the adoption of CBMs, ii) challenges to be faced to enact them and iii) innovative lifecycle assessment and circularity performance

Conclusions

The present paper conducted a systematic literature review to both explore the CBM research context, define the most common types of CBMs and their classification methods. The analysis states that most common CBMs are recycling practices and use-oriented PSSs, but also product- and result- oriented PSSs unveil strategic potentialities towards CE. What is evident from the literature is the big research gap in terms of how to practically transform a linear BM into a circular one, with very few

Acknowledgements

This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 760792. In any case, the present work cannot be considered as an official position of the supporting organization, but it reports just the point of view of the authors.

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