Exploring barriers to implementing different circular business models

TLDR: In this article, the authors identified barriers to implementation and compared them for different CBMs by analyzing 43 case studies of CBMs, based on in-depth interviews with 31 Dutch firms.

About: This article is published in Journal of Cleaner Production.The article was published on 2019-06-10 and is currently open access. It has received 149 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Business model.

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Table 3 Major barrier categories mentioned by firms, per type of CBM. PSS ¼ Product-as-a-service; PLE ¼ Product life extension; RR¼ resource recovery and CS¼ circular supplies.

Table 4 Coping strategies mentioned by firms.

Table 2 Number of case studies for each type of CBM.

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What have the authors contributed in "Exploring barriers to implementing different circular business models" ?

Barriers were analyzed for the following CBMs: circular supplies, resource recovery, product life extension, and the product-as-a-service model. This study shows that key challenges were related to the firm 's external environment, and that the barriers differed between the four business models studied. Whereas most internal barriers encountered by the product-as-a-service model were to do with organization ( for instance, of lease models ), the other models reported these barriers less frequently. The authors investigated the strategies firms used to overcome these barriers. 

Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "Exploring barriers to implementing different circular business models" ?

Since the sample size did not allow us to differentiate between sectors, this requires further research. The authors therefore recommend focusing future research on further exploring the barriers to implementation of different types of CBMs in a variety of specific sectors. A last promising avenue for further research would be to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-grained policies for promoting the implementation of CBMs, and of bespoke coping strategies and solutions for addressing specific barriers, once these strategies and solutions are in place.