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1. Introduction
This paper examines the managerial practices that companies can implement in order to design a circular economy business model and how companies can create and capture value from a circular economy business model.
The concept of a circular economy can be considered a branch of sustainability science, which is mainly rooted in the industrial ecology (Erkman, 1997), cradle-to-cradle (C2C) (McDonough and Braungart, 2002), and cleaner production (Fresner, 1998) research streams. The concept is undoubtedly becoming increasingly debated at the political and practitioner level. The recent European Union (EU) Action Plan on Circular Economy rapidly attracted attention, as the action plan aims to create new employment and business growth through circular economy (European Commission, 2015; Manninen et al., 2018). Similarly, the business environment finds the circular economy to be a means of value creation, cost reduction, revenue generation, and increased resiliency and legitimacy for companies (Park et al., 2010; Tukker, 2015; Manninen et al., 2018; Urbinati et al., 2017). More interestingly, the interest of academic journals in the circular economy has also grown tremendously, with the number of publications multiplying tenfold through the last decade (Geissdoerfer et al., 2017). Yet, it seems that scientific research is lagging behind compared to the political and practitioner engagement on the circular economy, and this urges for more academic involvement and collective effort (Korhonen et al., 2018).
The circular economy encourages people toward more sustainable behaviors and encourages policy makers to establish regulations that address principles of sustainability (Andersen, 2007; Besio and Pronzini, 2014; Miliute-Plepiene and Plepys, 2015; Schneider, 2015; Haas et al., 2015; Schaltegger et al., 2016). In particular, the issue of sustainable development has brought much attention to adopting policies that support the circular economy. On the other hand, we still lack the consolidated managerial directions that would support companies in implementing this paradigm. In other words, although several scientific contributions have started to shift attention from the macro (i.e. cities, regions, or nations are the units of analysis) or meso (i.e. eco-industrial parks are the units of analysis) levels of analysis to the micro (i.e. the company is the unit of analysis) level (Geng et al., 2016; Su et al., 2013), the issue of which...