ReviewTowards Circular Business Models: A systematic literature review on classification frameworks and archetypes
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:
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RQ1: Which existing BMs can be identified as CBMs?
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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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